Siege Fatigue

[muninnhuginn]

We all have them, I guess: those words we stumbled over in the course of our developing literacy. Well, I had a few which, like my persistent inability to spell feildfield correctly, have remained prominent in my memory. Each misapprehension was not so much a milestone but a cairn, irregularly constructed and weaving across the landscape. From each can be seen a unique view.

I hated school, or, rather, I was too scared of school to hate it. Each morning I went in with a sick stomach, terrified to do anything in case it was wrong, ashamed in advance for being so wrong. I think it must have affected my hearing. In assembly one morning of my first year of primary school, with the headmaster standing on the front of the stage way above my infant head, I listened through probably cold-congested ears and heard him say that the equator was an imaginary lion that ran around the world. I knew what the world looked like. I had the Galt Toys map of the world on my bedroom wall and was well on my way to eradicating the Galapagos Islands with my nightly reverential touch (I counted the dolphins regularly too until they became blurred.) The map had the equator clearly marked. So I already knew what it was. I also knew that the world wasn't really flat but a ball in space, a ball I now pictured having a lion with fiery mane ceaselessly circling. I think around that time I'd watched on TV, probably on John Craven's Newsround, volcanoes and earthquakes around the "circle of fire" in the Pacific ocean. I suppose that's how the lion acquired his blazing locks.

What astounds me is how long I carried two notions--the "true" equator represented by that printed horizontal line on my map and in Atlases, and Leo running rings around the world--in my mind with no sense that one might contradict the other. Like parallel lines, they never met but continued their independent courses through my thoughts. Then--

I was fourteen, sitting on the bus home from school. It was Autumn or Spring because dusk was coming early. Even sitting downstairs (the upper deck was full of the smokers) I could see over the hedges by the road, over the intervening fields, to the coast and, further off, to Man. The sun was flooding the horizon with fire. Into my mind popped the sudden thought, as if a barrier had burned down, a sudden neural connexion had been made, and I knew that the equator was not a lion, not even an imaginary one. I stared into the sunset with tears in my eyes. I was probably relieved to be on my own so there was no witness to my sorrow--and embarrassment. How could I ever have believed such a stupid, beautiful thing.

By the age of six, I was working through my list of things I wanted to be when I grew up--progressing from palaeontology (too many dirty bones) to archaeology (too many dirty human bones--and mummies) to anthropology. (No, I've done none of these: maybe when I grow up) . On the way, I'd read enough books to have gained an impressions of geological, and indeed historical, eras. I'd read about life in the carboniferous forests. I'd read about Stone Age man. On the shelves of the bookcases in the living room, up high where I couldn't have got it down even had it occurred to me to dare, was a book called The End of Economic Man (no link as I'm not sure which, if any, of the choices I've found is the correct one). Why, when I had already encountered the notion of much more modern historical periods--I was just heading into my obsession with the 17th century,--did I immediately imagine something more ancient? My head stuffed full of fossils and Littlenose on Jackanory, I imagined fur-clad economic man struggling against the elements surrounded by mammoth and sabre-tooth tiger. I was well into my 'A'-level Economics course, before the absurdity struck me. I still rather miss him, defiantly facing off the forces of capitalism, succumbing to the snares of consumerism, felled at last by the chills of a winter of discontent.

I suppose, were I nowadays to attempt to write verse, I might, in desperation, rhyme "siege" and "fatigue". Not so, long ago. (For one, I preferred free verse.) I can't remember where I first encountered siege on the page. I read enough children's historical fiction--Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece--and history books to have encountered the word in context and to have understood its meaning. I'd never, knowingly, heard it spoken. Come the annual reading test (could only find this as a pdf) that schools used at the time, the one with lists of progressively harder words that you read through until you accumulated three mistakes (I misremember: the document says ten) and "siege" rolled up its mighty towers and engines. Inside my fairly literate walls I huddled, fired pitiful vollies of pronunciation arrows--and failed to break it. "Seeg" [hard "g"]? "Say-g" [hard "g" again]? Nope. There was no recourse to using the word in a proper context or explaining what it meant. I couldn't pronounce it correctly. End of test.

To be honest, I can't be certain "siege" was the final word. Neither can I recall my other errors. Suffice it to say that from the age of seven (an age at which I hadn't learned to deliberately get a few things wrong in every test, an age in fact at which getting an answer wrong was tantamount to deliberately doing something wrong) when I first took the test, this was the deal breaker. My reading age stuck, annoyingly, at whatever was the smallest increment below the magical maximum of a reading age of 14 years. Forever and a day I have possessed a less then adult reading age because I failed "siege".

Was "fatigue" another of the reading test words? It might have been. Again, my memory fails, It was my Shardik moment, the word bear that bit. I'd comfortably read Watership Down to myself at age seven, having heard much but not all of a serialised reading on Radio 4. My father and I bought it jointly since it was quite an expensive paperback for a Puffin (more than the 20p cost of my copy of The Starlight Barking). When Shardik came out, it was borrowed for me from the adult section of the local library. I'd be eight or so. I think my father read it first, but I'm not certain. I can be absolutely certain that mother didn't: from all the immense publicity that surrounded the publication of Watership Down, she'd gained a highly unfavourable impression of Richard Adams and so wasn't in any hurry to read him.

Shardik was a tough read and I didn't finish the book (years later I bought my own copy and enjoyed getting to the end of it). I got bogged down in Bekla. However, before stalling, came the terrific scene of an army on the move with a huge caged bear and a skirmish at a river crossing. I recall my glee at the description of the cage hurtling out of control down the road's steep approach to the river and crushing soldiers under its wheels. I've always has a taste for the grisly. In the middle of this, there was a word that puzzled me: "fatigue". I asked my mother what it meant. I tried: "faggy-tay"? "fatty-gay"? I don't know whether she laughed or not, but I remember feeling humiliated by my incapability, for which understand incompetence. At least I knew what it meant, when I'd finally got her to understand what I was trying to say.

I've checked, now, and "fatigue" isn't in the Schonell Reading Test ("siege" is). It is in the Burt Reading Test (another pdf, sorry), which I might also have encountered.

When did these words cease to be problems? I don't know. At some point, tho' not in an instant of sudden recognition, I connected "fatigue" and "fatigué" and all made sense on that front. "Siege" probably sorted itself out when I finally got the hang of '"i" before "e" except after "c"'. For years I was missing those vital rhymes. Not:

"Sleep holds my senses under siege
My eyelids weep their great fatigue".

But:

"I can't go on. There is no way.
I'm burdened down with fatigue.
My men have marched now many a league.
They hove no strength to break the siege."

I don't know when I first encountered Goethe. It was probably via a reference--which classic English novel mentions Die Leiden des Jungen Werther, I wonder--and I've still not read more than a snatch of his work. I might have read his name before I began to learn German at school. It hardly matters: I didn't clock him as German. I did hear in my mind's ear the whisper of his name: "Go-eth-er" [ð not þ]. It hissed seductively, the epitome of the Romantic.

Times passes. Despite my inability to listen carefully and acquire adult reading skills, I somehow go off to university. Along the way, I have heard someone talk about a German poet, whose name--had I ever thought about its spelling, I'd've guessed--was, "Gerter". Puttering around, avoiding reading whatever I was meant to be studying, I picked up Die Leiden des Jungen Werther. It was possibly my final year and I was probably looking for something suitably miserable to throw at Tragedy to see if I could make it stick. "Go-eth-er"; "Gerter". In an instant my shadowy Romantic has gone, before I'd ever read a word of his non-existent works, his place taken by the "real" fellow.

What I like to think of as my Doppelgänger phase continued. Again, during my final year at university and its damned Tragedy paper, I studied the Greek tragedians, of whom, I was told, there were three whose works survived. I'd read one of them already, having looked at Sophocles' Antigone alongside Anouilh's while studying for 'A'-level French. So the other two? I heard their names spoken; if I'd read the names previously I'd seen the shape but not examined their pronunciation. I quickly matched the sound of Euripedes with his name. It's like Europe; the "e" lurks after the "u". So I located his works OK. The third one was a problem. There was this Aeschylus bloke on the appropriate shelves: must be a comedian. Nope, he's on the list, buy him. Can't find Iscalus (that's "Ee-skall-us", a bit like Icarus but with a long "i" at the beginning) anywhere. It didn't take me long to twig, but I still don't automatically associate the written name with the sounds in my head. For a brief time, tho', there was a fourth Greek tragedian, lost before he could ever be rediscovered,

There we have it: a saga of mishearing, misunderstanding, mispronunciation--spanning centuries and continents. With all these misapprehensions cleared up, the world is a flatter, duller place. Equator the Lion has burnt out with fatigue; the great works of the shadow poets are forever unwritten; economic man plods off to his desk in the City.

Illusions, especially those built on error, shatter. Watch out for the splinters.