Post 3

MARKS OF FAVOUR

As a small child, the first time I ever heard the phrase, I was intensely interested in marks of favour. Aunt Molly asked Father Horbark one day in my hearing how somebody had come by `that mark of favour'. And as she always ignored the presence of children up to about the age of twenty five and had a masterly habit of speaking over our heads without ever giving the impression that she imagined we did not hear what she said, we had the best of the silent world. So I had learned to be quiet and listen; even in young days it never occurred to me to butt into an adult conversation with a question. Personal questions were for one to one where they could not be put aside. I was delighted with this new idea. I turned it over and over, testing it on the senses. I never wanted to ask what a thing `was'. I took this particular gem of a phrase to be a mark left by `Favour', whoever Favour was, so the first time I ever saw a disfiguring but fascinating bright red mark almost covering the face of a crisp old soldierly man with clawlike hands buying carrots in the Birley Fine market-place I knew without being told that it was a Mark of Favour.

Whatever that mark might have told me about Favour I was never to know, being dragged hastily along by one of the young nurse-maids who came and went at that time during the first days of the war to help the Nanny to look after us (five or six of us, sometimes more). They were very carefully brought up these girls, much at home with horses - which I was already by that time in desperate fear of; and they came from families living in the country town where my grandmother, Sarah Yokeham, lived. They were also very young, as even I could tell by their being much inclined to argue gravely with us children, paying the homage of earnest attention to our childish sins of assertion and proposition.

"That gentleman has a birth-mark, and it is something that nice people do not notice," said this very young woman dragging me inescapably after her by reason of having my arm under a painful form of propulsion restricting to the backward stare. That Favour should be implicated in birth did not surprise me; as to `nice' the idea that I was not was disobliging to my sense not of my good manners but of my private self. This young person could have no slightest idea how extremely `nice' my private self was. I was greatly indignant. I concluded that I probably had a special kind of eyes that ordinary nice people had not got. I was most puzzled, perhaps, on account of the young lady herself seeing it only not to notice it.

Before it achieved clarity, my mind fell into a condition of prodigious density in the matter of `marks of Favour'. I had checked with the eager assistance of my sister Sarah that, disappointingly, I had no birthmark - without telling her, of course, what the result of the search might mean to me. After that a Mark of Favour had come by sequent stages to mean any eccentric mark which might be construed as `a sign' providing it took my fancy. A satisfactory image of Favour I could not arrive at. Favour's job in life I could not delineate for myself any further than that it was, at least, to give secrets and pleasure to me and my special eyes.

For example, there was in Birley Fine a tremendous tower. As you came down a paved alley-way, with cottages and little front gardens on one side which were threateningly overpowered by a pale brick wall of tremendous height and length on the other, you turned out then on to a fine piece of common land that lay between my grandmother's house and the town-houses. There was The Tower. It stood decorating and retaining the prodigious brick wall as it came round the corner and rushed through the open space and down into the town to meet there an identical tower, of no significance to me. My tower at the corner of the alley-way had upon its common-facing face one high wide aperture or slot from the sill of which fell, like a beard, a very long black smoky lop-sided stain. It gave the entire edifice a disturbingly vital look as of a being hungry to be fed, despite the number of birds it appeared constantly to swallow and regurgitate, or of a mouth uttering mournful prophecies to a careless because absent multitude; or, of some huge Moloch demanding horrible sacrifices. Sometimes its stained mouth seemed to sing dolefully over the common. And some days what I wanted, impossible I knew (and I discouraged myself on behalf of all those who would discourage me if I mentioned it), was to stand on the top of this uncommonly favour-marked tower, which spoke only to me, and look out over the common and the town, as near the sky as possible, and see what it and I could see: what Favour had in store up there. Some days the old tower wanted that too. But Favour denied it. I can remember coming down that alley-way, with one or other of my elder sisters, Frances or Sarah, full of erotic excitement and fear, to behold the mouth with its strange beard. I can remember waiting in a state of potential nerve-explosion in case either of them mentioned it. Fortunately, neither of them ever did; although it was Frances, catching me transfixed perhaps in fascinated gaze, who told me that the building behind the wall was St. Peter's Hospital. It had never occurred to me to take notice of the building or its vast ornamental gate further down, let alone ask what it `was'. Frances was always very free with information one did not need, and in this case, as in so many, she was wrong. It was St. Peter's Court, the headquarters of the county waterways board.

A line of one of the first hymns I learned to sing deepened the power of Favour. `To whom the lips of children make sweet hosannas ring' it ran. I saw Jesus bending down for each child to kiss him, and each pair of childish lips left on his cheek a sweet hosannas ring. I worked this out after a while to be the unlipsticked equivalent of a lipsticked kiss, a little round mark with tiny radials circling from a vacuole. In short, a mark of Favour called `a sweet-hosannas ring'.

Incidentally, there were several misconstructions of hearing in my head as of understanding in my mind at that time. An evening prayer which one of our Nannies taught us caused me a good deal of dreadful speculation in those moments before I eventually fell asleep, leaving my problem where it fell in the lap of God. It was a very simple prayer, sung to a simple tune.

Lord keep us safe this night
Secure from all our fears
May angels guard us while we sleep
''til morning light appears. Amen.

We used to sing it every evening before she left the room. To me it was badly upsetting, and no sooner had she gone than I would be at it, word for word, somewhere between prayer and exegesis. Lord keep us! This is very necessary, something very frightful might happen to us, might it? It seemed so. Save this night! Oh, save it indeed. But how would the Lord `save' the night? Why did it need `saving'? The possibility of not being able to take night and day for granted was certainly there. And suppose the Lord was not listening to our feeble pipe, and forgot to save it? Or suppose he refused to save it? What would then happen to it? If this were not terror enough, the next line was much worse. Seek cure for all our fears. The idea that even God had to seek cures before He handed them out! Who, on Earth, then, could be sure of finding one for himself? And supposing the answer to the last appeal was No, angels may not guard you while you sleep? What would happen? In our sleep would it be? (Some dreadful Archimago at work, I suppose I thought for although I had never heard of Archimago then, I recognised him at once, that giver of bad dreams having consequences in the real(ish) world, when I met him.) Or would it be behind our backs? Bombs, maybe? But there were perils much worse. Volcanoes? Earthquakes? Floods? All very much worse because although the war had started and bombs had fallen, I still retained a much greater respect for acts of God. And if angels may guard us, I pursued Him, then may they also not depart a moment earlier than morning light, please. I thought it safest to repeat, over and over again, the appeal for the angel-guardians (on the grounds, no doubt, that they at least would know their way to Heaven in the event of emergencies) and I put please at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of that diminished one-line prayer and finished off with several Amens.

Hymns and carols gave me great trouble. The line `Be we low or high' produced the low `beewee' and the high `beewee' to my lasting amazement, and `Joy has come for you and me' caused disgruntlement that Joy, coming as she did with a capital letter, was no further described as to hat or coat nor furnished with a good reason why you and I should go with her on Christmas morning. I settled to my satisfaction that she was Father Christmas's big wife, a replica of the old man himself without a beard but with a very bright red lipstick.

Gradually, egg, larva, pupa, the hosannas-ring and the beewee and the answer-do and that cruel invocation `Suffer! little children' found their way wriggling through the crevices on the outermost margins of the secret place where I had parked them and re-emerging at last shook their wings took their perfect shape and arrived in the common world, unnoticed by me. For it is only later when one recalls, accidentally, how the curious little eggs were laid in the mind that one realises that they, after all, emerged imagos and fled long ago.

`Mark of Favour' was in a quite different case. By the time Aunt Molly applied the phrase to me personally (and I knew not in what respect for I only noticed that I was being noticed just as the substance was disappearing) it had to its name not only kiss marks and rain stains on walls and rust speckles on books and birthmarks, but my grandfather's bookplate (I never saw that grandfather, either), the HMV trademark dog and gramophone; the Royal Standard and, to go with that, an intensely mysterious and magical sentence, bearing to me no sense whatever, which had said Swynnerton bore "Silver, a flowered cross sable", seen once in one of my grandfather's ancient journals and never since rediscovered. It did not need to be. I had copied it out so many times, the mark it made on the page, with its mysterious quotation marks (and the flag, as I took it to be, above it) was enough.

I suppose I had looked up at Aunt Molly very warily, considering perhaps in my mind what mark of favour she had found in me that I had been too nice to notice, and wondering if I should be pleased with it enough to admit it to the pantheon, or if I should be dissatisfied with its insignificance and disappointed in myself. I was asking myself, privately, the questions. But she read my face and she said, "A mark of favour means that you are distinguished, by someone, from the common run of people, and esteemed, by them, above others." I knew better.

Her answers to questions asked often raised more problems than they solved. Either because she did not understand children, having none of her own, only us three Yokehams, her nieces (which, I suppose, with Philip Harisonn, and sometimes James Harisonn, and Tom Kellory, Matthew's son, was quite an experience of children); or because she had a theory about children; or because she was lazy, as I sometimes incline now to believe; all of which are not the same thing but come to the same thing; in any case she never `talked down' to children and forbade others to do so `in her hearing'.

"It means you have been noticed, with interest, by someone," Matthew said, regarding me, his fingers spread out tips to tips, his legs - over which I stood astride, my ankles touching his - stretched out some yard or so in front of him.
"I know. And that someone's name is Favour," I said, always eager to show off for Matthew, ready even to throw my secrets away for him. At the time he was about forty, I supposed, but the most handsome man I had ever seen. He had a lovely face.
He laughed. "I think your Aunt was referring, in a roundabout way, to God."
Two things I knew. One was that Aunt Molly was not interested in God, roundabout or in any other way. The other was that you could not laugh and make jokes about God. So I knew it was Favour. Furthermore, I had enough experience to know that I had been `noticed with interest' by Favour already. I was going to marry Matthew, for one thing. He had a brown triangle mark I liked by his right eyebrow.

By the time the jays had distinguished me and set me above others by their notice, it was Favour's powers of noticing me that I was most keen on. Of course, I still noticed the work of Favour in Marks I found about me. But I was now able to construe the process as Favour noticing me. I was a scrupulous examiner. The jays were shy, therefore I was special. I began to think well of Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.