Alan Douglas - "Afloat"

James de Mille - "Cord and Creese"

Alice Turner Curtis - "A Little Maid of Old Maine"

Dutton Cook - "Art in England"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude




Then Sam Figgis, who was standing with his legs wide apart, said something
that Peter could not catch, and a little sigh of excitement went up all
round the room. Peter, who was clutching his chair with both hands, and
choking, very painfully, in his throat, knew, although he had no reason for
his knowledge, that the little man with the shining chest meant to kill
Stephen if he could.

The two men moved round the circle very slowly with their fists clenched
and their eyes watching every movement--then, suddenly, they closed. At
once Peter saw that the little man was very clever, cleverer than Stephen.
He moved with amazing quickness. Stephen's blows came like sledge-hammers,
and sometimes they fell with a dull heavy sound on the other man's face and
on his chest, but more often they missed altogether. The man seemed to be
everywhere at once, and although the blows that he gave Stephen seemed to
have little effect yet he got past the other's defence again and again.

Then, again, the figures in front of Peter closed in and he saw nothing. He
stood on his chair--no one noticed him now--but he could not see. His face
was very white, and his stockings had fallen down over his boots, but with
every movement he was growing more afraid. He caught an instant's vision
of Stephen's face, and he saw that it was white and that he was breathing
hard. The room seemed to be ominously silent, and then men would break out
into strange threatening sounds, and Peter could see one woman--a young
girl--with a red shawl about her shoulders, her back against the wall,
staring with a white face.

He could not see--he could not see....

He murmured once very politely--he thought he said it aloud but it was
really under his breath: "Please, please--would you mind--if you stood
aside--just a little...." but the man in front of him was absorbed and
heard nothing. Then he knew that there was a pause, he caught a glimpse of
the brick floor and he saw that Stephen was sitting back in his chair--his
face was white, and blood was trickling out from the corner of his mouth on
to his beard. Then Peter remembered old Frosted Moses' words: "The courage
you bring to it...." and he sat back in his chair again and, with hands
clenched, waited. He would be brave, braver than he had ever been before,
and perhaps in some strange way his bravery would help Stephen. He
determined with all the power that he had to be brave. They had begun
again, he heard the sound of the blows, the movement of the men's feet on
the rough brick of the floor; people cried out, the man in front of him
pressed forward and he had a sudden view. Stephen was on one knee and
his head was down and the other man was standing over him. It was all
over--Stephen was beaten--Stephen would be killed, and in another minute
Peter would have pushed past the people and run into the middle of the
room, but Sam Figgis had again come forward, and the two men were in their
chairs again. There followed another terrible time when Peter could see
nothing. He waited--he could hear them moving again, the noise of their
breathing and of their feet, the men in the crowd were pressing nearer, but
there was no word spoken.

He must see--at all costs he must see. And he climbed down from his chair,
and crept unnoticed towards the front. Nobody saw him or realised him....
Stephen was bending back, he seemed to be slowly sinking down. The other
man, from whose face blood was now streaming, was pressing on to him. Peter
knew that it was all over and that there was no hope; there was a dreadful
cold, hard pain in his throat, and he could scarcely see. Courage! he must
have it for Stephen. With every bit of his soul and his mind and his body
he was brave. He stood taut--his little legs stiff beneath him and flung
defiance at the world. He and Stephen were fighting that shiny man
together--both of them--now. Courage! Stephen's head lifted a little, and
then slowly Peter saw him pulling his body together--he grew rigid, he
raised his head, and, as a tree falls, his fist crashed into his enemy's
face. The man dropped without a word and lay motionless. It was over.
Stephen gravely watched for a moment the senseless body and then sat back
in his chair, his head bowed on his chest.

The fight had not, perhaps, been like that--there must have been many other
things that happened, but that was always how Peter remembered it. And now
there was confusion--a great deal of noise and people talking very loudly,
but Stephen said nothing at all. He did not look at the body again, but
when he had recovered a little, still without a word to any one and with
his eyes grave and without expression, he moved to the corner where his
clothes lay.

"'E's not dead."

"No--give 'im room there, he's moving," and from the back of the crowd the
Fool's silly face, peering over...

Peter crept unnoticed to the door. The clocks were striking ten, and some
one in the street was singing. He pulled up his stockings and fastened his
garters, then he slipped out into the snow and saw that the sky was full of
stars and that the storm had passed.




CHAPTER II

HOW THE WESTCOTT FAMILY SAT UP FOR PETER


I

The boy always reckoned that, walking one's quickest, it took half an hour
from the door of The Bending Mule to Scaw House, where his father lived. If
a person ran all the way twenty minutes would perhaps cover it, but, most
of the time, the road went up hill and that made running difficult; he had
certainly no intention of running to-night, there were too many things to
think about. That meant, then, that he would arrive home about half-past
ten, and there would be his aunt and his grandfather and his father sitting
up waiting for him.

The world was very silent, and the snow lay on the round cobbles of the
steep street with a bright shining whiteness against the black houses and
the dark night sky. Treliss' principal street was deserted; all down the
hill red lights showed in the windows and voices could be heard, singing
and laughing, because on Christmas Eve there would be parties and
merrymakings. Peter looked a tiny and rather desolate figure against the
snow as he climbed the hill. There was a long way to go. There would be
Green Street at the top, past the post office, then down again into the
Square where the Tower was, then through winding turnings up the hill past
the gates and dark trees of The Man at Arms, then past the old wall of the
town and along the wide high road that runs above the sea until at last one
struck the common, and, hidden in a black clump of trees (so black on a
night like this), the grim grey stones of Scaw House.

Peter was not afraid of being alone, although when snow had fallen
everything seemed strange and monstrous, the trees were like animals,
and the paths of all the world were swept away. But he was not afraid of
ghosts; he was too accustomed to their perpetual company; old Frosted Moses
and Dicky, and even men like Stephen, had seen ghosts so often, and Peter
himself could tell odd stories about the Grey Hill--no, ghosts held no
terror. But, very slowly, the shadow of all that he must very soon go
through was creeping about him. When he first came out of The Bending Mule
he still was as though he were in a dream. Everything that had happened
there that evening had been so strange, so amazing, that it belonged to
the world of dreams--it was of the very stuff of them, and that vision of
Stephen, naked, bleeding, so huge and so terrible, was not to be easily
forgotten.

But, as he climbed the steep street, Peter knew that however great a dream
that might be, there was to be no dreaming at all about his meeting with
his father, and old Frosted Moses' philosophy would be very sadly needed.
As he climbed the hill the reaction from the excitement of his late
adventure suddenly made him very miserable indeed, so that he had an
immediate impulse to cry, but he stood still in the middle of the street
and made fists with his hands and called himself "a damned gawky idiot,"
words that he had admired in the mouth of Sam Figgis some days before.
"Gawky" was certainly the last thing that he was, but it was a nice queer
word, and it helped him a great deal.

The worst of everything was that he had had a number of beatings lately and
the world could not possibly go on, as far as he was concerned, if he had
many more. Every beating made matters worse and his own desperate attempts
to be good and to merit rewards rather than chastisement met with no
success. The hopeless fact of it all was that it had very little to do with
his own actions; his father behaved in the same way to every one, and Mrs.
Trussit, the housekeeper, old Curtis the gardener, Aunt Jessie, and all
the servants, shook under his tongue and the cold glitter of his eyes, and
certainly the maids would long ago have given notice and departed were it
not that they were all afraid to face him. Peter knew that that was true,
because Mrs. Trussit had told him so. It was this hopeless feeling of
indiscriminate punishment that made everything so bad. Until he was eight
years old Peter had not been beaten at all, but when he was very young
indeed he had learnt to crawl away when he heard his father's step, and
he had never cried as a baby because his nurse's white scared face had
frightened him so. And then, of course, there was his mother, his poor
mother--that was another reason for silence. He never saw his mother for
more than a minute at a time because she was ill, had been ill for as long
as he could remember. When he was younger he had been taken into his
mother's room once or twice a week by Mrs. Trussit, and he had bent down
and kissed that white tired face, and he had smelt the curious smell in the
room of flowers and medicine, and he had heard his mother's voice, very far
away and very soft, and he had crept out again. When he was older his aunt
told him sometimes to go and see his mother, and he would creep in alone,
but he never could say anything because of the whiteness of the room and
the sense of something sacred like church froze his speech. He had never
seen his father and mother together.

His mornings were always spent with old Parlow, and in the afternoon he was
allowed to ramble about by himself, so that it was only at mealtimes and
during the horrible half-hour after supper before he went up to bed that he
saw his father.

He really saw more of old Curtis the gardener, but half an hour with his
father could seem a very long time. Throughout the rest of his life that
half-hour after supper remained at the back of his mind--and he never
forgot its slightest detail. The hideous dining-room with the large
photographs of old grandfather and grandmother Westcott in ill-fitting
clothes and heavy gilt frames, the white marble clock on the mantelpiece, a
clock that would tick solemnly for twenty minutes and then give a little
run and a jump for no reason at all, the straight horsehair sofa so black
and uncomfortable with its hard wooden back, the big dining-room table with
its green cloth (faded a little in the middle where a pot with a fern in it
always stood) and his aunt with her frizzy yellow hair, her black mittens
and her long bony fingers playing her interminable Patience, and then two
arm-chairs by the fire, in one of them old grandfather Westcott, almost
invisible beneath a load of rugs and cushions and only the white hairs on
the top of his head sticking out like some strange plant, and in the other
chair his father, motionless, reading the _Cornish Times_--last of all,
sitting up straight with his work in front of him, afraid to move, afraid
to cough, sometimes with pins and needles, sometimes with a maddening
impulse to sneeze, always with fascinated glances out of the corner of his
eye at his father--Peter himself. How happy he was when the marble clock
struck nine, and he was released! How snug and friendly his little attic
bedroom was with its funny diamond-paned window under the shelving roof
with all the view of the common and the distant hills that covered Truro!
There, at any rate, he was free!

He was passing now through the Square, and he stopped for an instant and
looked up at the old weather-beaten Tower that guarded one side of it, and
looked so fine and stately now with the white snow at its foot and the
gleaming sheet of stars at its back. That old Tower had stood a good number
of beatings in its day--it knew well enough what courage was--and so Peter,
as he turned up the hill, squared his shoulders and set his teeth. But in
some way that he was too young to understand he felt that it was not the
beating itself that frightened him most, but rather all the circumstances
that attended it--it was even the dark house, the band of trees about it,
that first dreadful moment when he would hear his knock echo through the
passages, and then the patter of Mrs. Trussit's slippers as she came to
open the door for him--then Mrs. Trussit's fat arm and the candle raised
above her head, and "Oh, it's you, Mr. Peter," and then the opening of the
dining-room door and "It's Master Peter, sir," and then that vision of the
marble clock and his father's face behind the paper. These things were
unfair and more than any one deserved. He had had beatings on several
occasions when he had merited no punishment at all, but it did not make
things any better that on this occasion he did deserve it; it only made
that feeling inside his chest that everything was so hopeless that nothing
whatever mattered, and that it was always more fun to be beaten for a sheep
than a lamb, stronger than ever.

But the world--or at any rate the Scaw House portion of it--could not
move in this same round eternally. Something would happen, and the vague,
half-confessed intention that had been in his mind for some time now was
a little more defined. One day, like his three companions, Tom Jones,
Peregrine Pickle and David Copperfield, he would run into the world
and seek his fortune, and then, afterwards, he would write his book of
adventures as they had done. His heart beat at the thought, and he passed
the high gates and dark trees of The Man at Arms with quick step and head
high. He was growing old--twelve was an age--and there would soon be a time
when beatings must no longer be endured. He shivered when he thought of
what would happen then--the mere idea of defying his father sent shudders
down his back, but he was twelve, he would soon be thirteen....

But this Scaw House, with its strange silence and distresses, was only half
his life. There was the other existence that he had down in the town, out
at Stephen's farm, wandering alone on the Grey Hill, roaming about along
the beach and in amongst the caves, tramping out to The Hearty Cow, a
little inn amongst the gorse, ten miles away, or looking for the lost
church among the sand-dunes at Porthperran. All these things had nothing
whatever to do with his father and old Parlow and his lessons--and it was
undoubtedly this other sort of life that he would lead, with the gipsies
and the tramps, when the time came for him to run away. He knew no other
children of his own age, but he did not want them; he liked best to talk
to old Curtis the gardener, to Dicky the Idiot, to Sam Figgis when that
splendid person would permit it--and, of course, to Stephen.

He passed the old town wall and stepped out into the high road. Far below
him was the sea, above him a sky scattered with shining stars and around
him a white dim world. Turning a corner the road lay straight before him
and to the right along the common was the black clump of trees that hid his
home. He discovered that he was very tired, it had been a most exhausting
day with old Parlow so cross in the morning and the scene in the inn at
night--and now--!

His steps fell slower and slower as he passed along the road. One hot hand
was clutching Parlow's note and in his throat there was a sharp pain that
made it difficult to swallow, and his eyes were burning. Suppose he never
went home at all! Supposing he went off to Stephen's farm!--it was a long
way and he might lose his way in the snow, but his heart beat like a hammer
when he thought of Stephen coming to the door and of the little spare room
where Stephen put his guests to sleep. But no--Stephen would not want him
to-night; he would be very tired and would rather be alone; and then there
would be the morning, when it would be every bit as bad, and perhaps worse.
But if he ran away altogether? ... He stopped in the middle of the road and
thought about it--the noise of the sea came up to him like the march of men
and with it the sick melancholy moan of the Bell Rock, but the rest of the
world was holding its breath, so still it seemed. But whither should he
run? He could not run so far away that his father could not find him--his
father's arm stretched to everywhere in the world. And then it was cowardly
to run away. Where was that courage of which he had been thinking so much?
So he shook his little shoulders and pulled up those stockings again and
turned up the little side road, usually so full of ruts and stones and now
so level and white with the hard snow. Now that his mind was made up, he
marched forward with unfaltering step and clanged the iron gates behind him
so that they made a horrible noise, and stepped through the desolate garden
up the gravel path.

The house looked black and grim, but there were lights behind the
dining-room windows--it was there that they were sitting, of course.

As he stood on his toes to reach the knocker a shooting star flashed past
above his head, and he could hear the bare branches of the trees knocking
against one another in the wind that always seemed to be whistling round
the house. The noise echoed terribly through the building, and then there
was a silence that was even more terrible. He could fancy how his aunt
would start and put down her Patience cards for a moment and look, in
her scared way, at the window--he knew that his father would not move
from behind his paper, and that there would be no other sound unless his
grandfather awoke. He heard Mrs. Trussit's steps down the passage, then
locks were turned, the great door swung slowly open, and he saw her, as he
had pictured it, with a candle in her hand raised above her head, peering
into the dark.

"Oh! it's you, Master Peter," and she stood aside, without another word,
to let him in. He slipped past her, silently, into the hall and, after a
second's pause, she followed him in, banging the hall door behind her. Then
she opened the dining-room door announcing, grimly, "It's Master Peter come
in, sir." The marble clock struck half-past ten as she spoke.

He stood just inside the door blinking a little at the sudden light and
twisting his cloth cap round and round in his hands. He couldn't see
anything at first, and he could not collect his thoughts. At last he said,
in a very little voice:

"I've come back, father."

The lights settled before his eyes, and he saw them all exactly as he had
thought they would be. His father had not looked up from his paper, and
Peter could see the round bald patch on the top of his head. Aunt Jessie
was talking to herself about her cards in a very agitated whisper--"Now
it's the King I want--how provoking! Ah, there's the seven of spades, _and
the six and the five_--oh dear! it's a club," and not looking up at all.

No one answered his remark, and the silence was broken by his grandfather
waking up; a shrill piping voice came from out of the rugs. "Oh! dear, what
a doze I've had! It must be eight o'clock! What a doze for an old man to
have! on such a cold night too," and then fell asleep again immediately.

At last Peter spoke again in a voice that seemed to come from quite another
person.

"Father--I've come back!"

His father very slowly put down his newspaper and looked at him as though
he were conscious of him for the first time. When he spoke it was as
though his voice came out of the ceiling or the floor because his face did
not seem to move at all.

"Where have you been?"

"In the town, father."

"Come here."

He crossed the room and stood in front of the fire between his father and
grandfather. He was tremendously conscious of the grim and dusty cactus
plant that stood on a little table by the window.

"What have you been doing in the town?"

"I have been in The Bending Mule, father."

"Why did you not come home before?"

There was no answer.

"You knew that you ought to come home?"

"Yes, father. I have a letter for you from Mr. Parlow. He said that I was
to tell you that I have done my sums very badly this week and that I gave
Willie Daffoll a bleeding nose on Wednesday--"

"Yes--have you any excuse for these things?"

"No, father."

"Very well. You may go up to your room. I will come up to you there."

"Yes, father."

He crossed the room very slowly, closed the door softly behind him, and
then climbed the dark stairs to his attic.


II

He went trembling up to his room, and the match-box shook in his hand as he
lit his candle. It was only the very worst beatings that happened in his
bedroom, his father's gloomy and solemn study serving as a background on
more unimportant occasions. He could only remember two other beatings in
the attics, and they had both been very bad ones. He closed his door and
then stood in the middle of the room; the little diamond-paned window was
open and the glittering of the myriad stars flung a light over his room and
shone on the little bracket of books above his bed (a Bible, an "Arabian
Nights," and tattered copies of "David Copperfield," "Vanity Fair,"
"Peregrine Pickle," "Tom Jones," and "Harry Lorrequer"), on the little
washing stand, a chest of drawers, a cane-bottomed chair, and the little
bed. There were no pictures on the walls because of the sloping roof, but
there were two china vases on the mantelpiece, and they were painted a very
bright blue with yellow flowers on them.

They had been given to Peter by Mrs. Flanders, the Rector's wife, who
had rather a kind feeling for Peter, and would have been friendly to him
had he allowed her. He took off his jacket and put it on again, he stood
uncertainly in the middle of the floor, and wondered whether he ought
to undress or no. There was no question about it now, he was horribly,
dreadfully afraid. That wisdom of old Frosted Moses seemed a very long ago,
and it was of very little use. If it had all happened at once after he
had come in then he might have endured it, but this waiting and listening
with the candle guttering was too much for him. His father was so very
strong--he had Peter's figure and was not very tall and was very broad in
the back; Peter had seen him once when he was stripped, and the thought of
it always frightened him.

His face was white and his teeth would chatter although he bit his lips and
his fingers shook as he undressed, and his stud slipped and he could not
undo his braces--and always his ears were open for the sound of the step on
the stairs.

At last he was in his night-shirt, and a very melancholy figure he looked
as he stood shivering in the middle of the floor. It was not only that he
was going to be beaten, it was also that he was so lonely. Stephen seemed
so dreadfully far away and he had other things to think about; he wondered
whether his mother in that strange white room ever thought of him, his
teeth were chattering, so that his whole head shook, but he was afraid
to get into bed because then he might go to sleep and it would be so
frightening to be woken by his father.

The clock downstairs struck eleven, and he heard his father's footstep. The
door opened, and his father came in holding in his hand the cane that Peter
knew so well.

"Are you there?" the voice was very cold.

"Yes, father."

"Do you know that you ought to be home before six?"

"Yes, father."

"And that I dislike your going to The Bending Mule?"

"Yes, father."

"And that I insist on your doing your work for Mr. Parlow?"

"Yes, father."

"And that you are not to fight the other boys in the town?"

"Yes, father."

"Why do you disobey me like this?"

"I don't know. I try to be good."

"You are growing into an idle, wicked boy. You are a great trouble to your
mother and myself."

"Yes, father. I want to be better."

Even now he could admire his father's strength, the bull-neck, the dark
close-cropped hair, but he was cold, and the blood had come where he bit
his lip--because he must not cry.

"You must learn obedience. Take off your nightshirt."

He took it off, and was a very small naked figure in the starlight, but his
head was up now and he faced his father.

"Bend over the bed."

He bent over the bed, and the air from the window cut his naked back. He
buried his head in the counterpane and fastened his teeth in it so that he
should not cry out....

During the first three cuts he did not stir, then an intolerable pain
seemed to move through his body--it was as though a knife were cutting his
body in half. But it was more than that--there was terror with him now in
the room; he heard that little singing noise that came through his father's
lips--he knew that his father was smiling.

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