Back View

My childhood is full of muted voices asking me in pained tones the whereabouts of vanished property. Once upon a time these voices complained stridently but my memory is carefully selective. It has softened the sound and turned if not a blind eye then at least a deaf ear in the direction of the past.
I recollect the voices as whispers, indistinct, almost not there at all. I do not remember screams or even the harsh baying of an angry posse come to retrieve some stolen article. That is all squeezed down among the dead men. I cannot remember the voices. The goods on the other hand I see clearly before me in minute and cherished detail.
Among them was a wooden gun, a pistol, a kind of small imitation Luger, painted grey and black, with a tin finger guard and a nail for a trigger. I suspect it had had an owner and I am sure that I could have identified him had I wished. I was certainly not that person, for I kept the toy jealously hidden in a nook in the ivy of the stone wall that separated Cove Cottage from the property next door and never showed it to anyone.
I would take the pistol out from its hiding place among the leaves and finger it cautiously and sight it on imaginary targets in the garden. Miss Maggs, Winston Churchill, German pilots all raised their hands at my command or bit the dust. This was not an activity I risked when I had company or might have been observed. That alone leads me to suspect that I did not have firm and legitimate title to the weapon.
I do have a vague memory of a previous owner, an older boy. The memory is shadowy. He is almost a ghost figure, hovering about me, entrusting me with the weapon, and disappearing.
He never surfaced again.
Perhaps it was the start of the summer season and we had to leave on our annual housing peregrinations before he returned to claim his gun.
I think that might have been what happened, for among other half forgotten memories I see myself returning after a long absence and joyfully retrieving my pistol once more from among the ivy berries.
But there is some confusion.
During these years dream and fact and history were all mixed up together and it is hard to determine what happened when, and how and why. It was a story that would not sit still for the camera.
I vaguely call to mind a transaction with treasonable undertones. There are echoes of Excalibur and a whiff of Faust. Is it possible I had swapped one of the beautifully crafted and decorated model aircraft my father brought home for me as a present from the RAF and received this crude and fascinating weapon in exchange?
I do know that the gun was particularly dear to me.
My father’s aeroplanes, on the other hand, seemed to invite destruction. They never lasted very long. They went missing in action during their first weeks.
There is also a half-memory of my mother asking me where the gun had come from. There was the unspoken accusation that I had stolen it from somebody else. The real facts, whatever they were, are lost in time. If a crime had been committed, whether of theft or of betrayal, I have airbrushed it from my memory. I recollect only that the pistol somehow seemed to be tarred with guilt. Early in its life it became quite necessary to keep it hidden.
Sometimes when I went to play with it I did not even take it out of its hiding place in the ivy. The ripe ivy berries that hung there looked wonderfully like large lead shot. I picked them and used them as bullets, rolling them around in my palm and hurling them at enemies in the shrubbery. Most of my games with the gun were in my imagination, but its very presence hidden behind the leathery green leaves filled me with power.

One day I went out to be close to my gun and when I arrived at the wall something in the long grass beside the garden shed caught my eye.
I paused and looked down.
There was a clearing where the grass stems had bent over under their own weight and there curled up in a patch of sunlight I met my first snake.
All thought of pistol play now vanished from my mind.
No armament could compare with this creature.
I knew its reputation from afar. It was power and it was mystery. If the wind carried gods through the garden and the clouds whispered their immanence, this snake was much more. It was incarnate and a god in its own right.
It had stepped out of the story books and the Bible and myth and here it was, waiting for me, curled up in my grass, beside my ivy, guarding my pistol. This was no imaginary dragon. It was flesh.
I did not call my mother. I knew this was uniquely my moment. I would savour it alone.

The snake was a small one, grey-brown and smooth.
It was hard to tell which end was which.
I could make out neither eye nor mouth. It seemed more the generic, undifferentiated idea of a snake, a hieroglyph rather than an actual living animal.
I crouched down perfectly still and watched.
The snake lay coiled in the grass drinking sunshine through its skin. It looked like a sleeping spring, wound up but infinitely relaxed. Tiny scale patterns shone along its flank as in a finely woven fabric. Its back shimmered. It was a silk stocking that breathed.
I did not touch.
In the silence and the stillness I took possession of it in the name of the garden.
I remained looking at my snake for a long time.
Then I tiptoed away.
I heard my feet self-consciously reach the gravel path and a breeze blew along the garden wall. There was a rustling and the ivy on the wall began to undulate, wavelike, as though something sinuous and large moved beneath the leathern, scaly leaves.
I understood. There was no need for words.