FILM-MAKING BY INGMAR BERGMAN | MUKUND PADMANABHAN

FILM-MAKING 

INGMAR BERGMAN

Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity of their content, and a certain brooding presence that seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings. In the following selection, the Introduction to Four Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman discusses how he views the art of film-making.

During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, raindimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes. Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, makeup men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm. Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky. Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and then another, and then several cranes floating majestically

in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better. We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought: this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is what can happen, this is how we work together with our old equipment and little money, and this is how we can suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating above the tree tops.

CHILDHOOD FORETELLS FUTURE

My association with film goes back to the world of childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there, ‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way. One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was five years old, a piano was being played in the next apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved across the picture the water in the canal began to flow, the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came from that remarkable picture of Venice.

A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages, baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there was a need to personify him. This is where my magic lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil, without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth, strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.

When I was ten years old I received my first, rattling film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine feet long and brown in colour. It showed a girl lying asleep in a meadow, who woke up and stretched out her arms, then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it. The film was a great success and was projected every night until it broke and could not be mended any more.

This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set. And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness—the blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner—make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved or perhaps yawn with boredom. Thus I am either an impostor or, when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.

SPLIT SECOND IMPRESSIONS

A film for me begins with something very vague—a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes in my work at the theatre I have envisioned actors made up for yet unplayed roles.

These are split second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood—like pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.

This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form, moving in a way that may be lazy and half asleep at first. Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms which are very special and unique to each film. The picture sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my original stimulus.

If that embryonic substance seems to have enough strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialise it. Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the transformation of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences, into an understandable screenplay.

This is an almost impossible task. The only thing that can be satisfactorily transferred from that original complex of rhythms and moods is the dialogue, and even dialogue is a sensitive substance which may offer resistance. Written dialogue is like a musical score, almost incomprehensible to the average person. Its interpretation demands a technical knack plus a certain kind of imagination and feeling— qualities which are so often lacking, even among actors. One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered, its rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between lines—all this must be omitted for practical reasons. Such a detailed script would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as to location, characterisation and atmosphere into my screenplays in understandable terms, but the success of this depends on my writing ability and the perceptiveness of the reader, which are not always predictable.

THE RHYTHM OF A FILM

Now we come to essentials, by which I mean montage, rhythm and the relation of one picture to another—the vital third dimension without which the film is merely a dead product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a key, as in a musical score, nor a specific idea of the tempo which determines the relationship of the elements involved. It is quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which the film ‘breathes’ and pulsates.

I have often wished for a kind of notation which would enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film. For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and irritating details that go with motion-picture production, it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or what was the relation between the scene of four weeks ago and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in explicit symbols, then this problem would be almost eliminated and I could work with absolute confidence that whenever I liked I could prove the relationship between the part and the whole and put my finger on the rhythm, the continuity of the film.

Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a film. And there is another important point in this connection which I should like to mention. Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with the receptive process of the mind. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.

FILM AND WRITTEN LITERATURE

It is mainly because of this difference between film and literature that we should avoid making films out of books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms— and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film. If, despite this, we wish to translate something literary into film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated adjustments which often bear little or no fruit in proportion to the effort expended.

I myself have never had any ambition to be an author. I do not want to write novels, short stories, essays, biographies, or even plays for the theatre. I only want to make films - films about conditions, tensions, pictures, rhythms and characters which are in one way or another important to me. The motion picture, with its complicated process of birth, is my method of saying what I want to my fellow men. I am a film-maker, not an author.

Thus the writing of the script is a difficult period but a useful one, for it compels me to prove logically the validity of my ideas. In doing this, I am caught in a conflict—a conflict between my need to transmit a complicated situation through visual images, and my desire for absolute clarity. I do not intend my work to be solely for the benefit of myself or the few, but for the entertainment of the general public. The wishes of the public are imperative. But sometimes I risk following my own impulse, and it has been shown that the public can respond with surprising sensitivity to the most unconventional line of development. When shooting begins, the most important thing is that those who work with me feel a definite contact, that all of us somehow cancel out our conflicts through working together. We must pull in one direction for the sake of the work at hand. Sometimes this leads to dispute. But the more definite and clear the ‘marching orders’, the easier it is to reach the goal which has been set. This is the basis for my conduct as director, and perhaps the explanation of much of the nonsense that has been written about me.

While I cannot let myself be concerned with what people think and say about me personally, I believe that reviewers and critics have every right to interpret my films as they like. I refuse to interpret my work to others, and I cannot tell the critic what to think; each person has the right to understand a film as he sees it. Either he is attracted or repelled. A film is made to create reaction. If the audience does not react one way or another, it is an indifferent work and worthless.

I do not mean by this that I believe in being ‘different’ at any price. A lot has been said about the value of originality, and I find this foolish. Either you are original or you are not. It is completely natural for artists to take from and give to each other, to borrow from and experience one another. In my own life, my great literary experience was Strindberg. There are works of his which can still make my hair stand on end—The People of Hemso, for example. And it is my dream to produce Dream Play some day. Olof Molander’s production of it in 1934 was for me a fundamental dramatic experience.

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against. In my family there was an atmosphere of hearty wholesomeness which I, a sensitive young plant, scorned and rebelled against. But that strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against. At the same time they taught me a number of values—efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility—which may be ‘bourgeois’ but are nevertheless important to the artist. They are part of the process of setting oneself severe standards. Today as a film maker I am conscientious, hard-working and extremely careful; my films involve good craftsmanship, and my pride is the pride of a good craftsman.

Among the people who have meant something in my professional development is Torsten Hammaren of Gothenburg. I went there from Hälsingborg, where I had been head of the municipal theatre for two years. I had no conception of what theatre was; Hammaren taught me during the four years I stayed in Gothenburg. Then, when I made my first attempts at film, Alf Sjöberg—who directed Torment—taught me a great deal. And there was Lorens Marmstedt, who really taught me filmmaking from scratch after my first unsuccessful movie. Among other things I learned from Marmstedt is the one unbreakable rule: you must look at your own work very coldly and clearly; you must be a devil to yourself in the screening room when watching the day’s rushes. Then there is Herbert Grevenius, one of the few who believed in me as a writer. I had trouble with script-writing, and was reaching out more and more to the drama, to dialogue, as a means of expression. He gave me great encouragement.

Finally, there is Carl Anders Dymling, my producer. He is crazy enough to place more faith in the sense of responsibility of a creative artist than in calculations of profit and loss. I am thus able to work with an integrity that has become the very air I breathe, and one of the main reasons I do not want to work outside of Sweden. The moment I lose this freedom I will cease to be a film-maker, because I have no skill in the art of compromise. My only significance in the world of film lies in the freedom of my creativity.

THE TIGHTROPE OF FILM-MAKING

Today, the ambitious film-maker is obliged to walk a tightrope without a net. He may be a conjurer, but no one conjures the producer, the bank director or the theatre owners when the public refuses to go see a film and lay down the money by which producer, bank director, theatre owner and conjurer can live. The conjurer may then be deprived of his magic wand; I would like to be able to measure the amount of talent, initiative and creative ability which has been destroyed by the film industry in its ruthlessly efficient sausage machine. What was play to me once has now become a struggle. Failure, criticism, public indifference all hurt more today than yesterday. The brutality of the industry is undisguised—yet that can be an advantage.

So much for people and the film business. I have been asked, as a clergyman’s son, about the role of religion in my thinking and film-making. To me, religious problems are continuously alive. I never cease to concern myself with them; it goes on every hour of every day. Yet this does not take place on the emotional level, but on an intellectual one. Religious emotion, religious sentimentality, is something I got rid of long ago—I hope. The religious problem is an intellectual one to me: the relationship of my mind to my intuition. The result of this conflict is usually some kind of tower of Babel.

Philosophically, there is a book which was a tremendous experience for me: Eiono Kaila’s Psychology of the Personality. His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs— negative and positive—was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground.

CATHEDRAL-BUILDING

People ask what are my intentions with my films—my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.

There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed—master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values’, ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.

Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps a saint—out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

INTERVIEW WITH UMBERTO ECO

With over 30 honorary doctorates and a string of literary and academic awards, Umberto Eco has the reputation of being one of the world’s foremost intellectuals. A professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, Umberto Eco is known for his ideas on semiotics, literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics. He is a distinguished novelist and writer. His novel, The Name of the Rose, published in 1980 sold over ten million copies. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Eco where he expresses his views on the filming of books.

The Name of the Rose is a very serious novel. It’s a detective yarn at one level but it also delves into metaphysics, theology, and medieval history. Yet it enjoyed a huge mass audience. Were you puzzled at all by this?

No. Journalists are puzzled. And sometimes publishers. And this is because journalists and publishers believe that people like trash and don’t like difficult reading experiences. Consider there are six billion people in this planet. The Name of the Rose sold between 10 and 15 million copies. So in a way I reached only a small percentage of readers. But it is exactly these kinds of readers who don’t want easy experiences. Or at least don’t always want this. I myself, at 9 pm after dinner, watch television and want to see either ‘Miami Vice’ or ‘Emergency Room’. I enjoy it and I need it. But not all day.

Could the huge success of the novel have anything to do with the fact that it dealt with a period of medieval history that...

That’s possible. But let me tell you another story, because I often tell stories like a Chinese wise man. My American publisher said while she loved my book, she didn’t expect to sell more than 3,000 copies in a country where nobody has seen a cathedral or studies Latin. So I was given an advance for 3,000 copies, but in the end it sold two or three million in the U.S. A lot of books have been written about the medieval past far before mine. I think the success of the book is a mystery. Nobody can predict it. I think if I had written The Name of the Rose ten years earlier or ten years later, it wouldn’t have been the same. Why it worked at that time is a mystery.

What did you think about the film [directed by Jean Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery]? Why weren’t you happy with it?

I expected the film to be different. My novel is a kind of club sandwich—lettuce, tomato, cheese...

Different layers of meaning?

Yes. A film cannot select all the layers. It has to make do with jambon or cheese... I didn’t react like authors who, immediately after the film is made, say it is not at all like my book. But after that experience, I asked my publisher not to sell the rights of the novel to cinema. I did this because I discovered that 80 per cent of readers read the book after the movie. And that is very painful for a novelist.

But surely this also means greater success, greater remuneration?

Yes. But it is embarrassing to know that somebody else has already told the reader that the novel should be read in a particular way. That he should imagine the face of a character in a particular way. The only enviable position is that of Homer’s who had the film made more than 2000 years after the book (laughs).

So this is why Stanley Kubrick never got to make Foucault’s Pendulum?

Since I had laid down a general rule, the publisher said no. Then Stanley Kubrick died. But it may have been a great movie (laughs).

Talking about Foucault’s Pendulum, there is a sense in which you did the Da Vinci Code before Dan Brown did. Of course, you did it as a myth that takes on a strange reality and he did it as it was historical truth.

I told Dan Brown’s story. My characters are his. I gave the broad picture of this kind of literature. MUKUND PADMANABHAN

THE MARK ON THE WALL BY VIRGINIA WOOLF

THE MARK ON THE WALL  

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her father’s extensive library. The famous group of intellectuals which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of Cambridge University graduates and their friends in Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia started the Hogarth Press which became a successful publishing house. In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she experimented with new techniques, particularly new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed that much imaginative literature is false to life because it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our experiences actually flow together like a stream. This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate shades of mental experience.

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.

But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the

roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour— landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard.....

But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour-dim pinks and blues-which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become-I don’t know what...

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes... Shakespeare... Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair, and looked into the fire, so—a shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening—but how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mousecoloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:

‘And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I asked—(but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realise more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which, as a child, one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation.

Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits— like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives which sets the standard, which established Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists....

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf... There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name... What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I dare say, leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrow-head there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a picture of Roman pottery, and the wineglass that Nelson drank out of—proving I really don’t know what.

No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall we say? the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the waterlilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack*—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

Here is Nature once more at her old game of selfpreservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York

Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.

I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall. Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of... Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the

feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the way... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing... There is a vast upheaval of matter Someone is standing over me and saying: ‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Though it’s no good buying newspapers... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’ Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail...

UNDERSTANDING FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE BY JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

UNDERSTANDING FREEDOM AND DISCIPLINE

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a world renowned writer and speaker on fundamental philosophical and spiritual subjects such as the purpose of meditation, human relationships, and how to bring about positive change in global society. His supporters, working through several non-profit foundations, oversee a number of independent schools centred on his views on education, in India, England and the United States. His talks, group and individual discussions, and other writings are published in a variety of formats including print, audio-video as well as online, in many languages.

The problem of discipline is really quite complex, because most of us think that through some form of discipline we shall eventually have freedom. Discipline is the cultivation of resistance, is it not? By resisting, by building a barrier within ourselves against something which we consider wrong, we think we shall be more capable of understanding and of being free to live fully; but that is not a fact, is it? Surely, it is only when there is freedom, real freedom to think, to discover—that you can find out anything.

But freedom obviously cannot exist in a frame. And most of us live in a frame, in a world enclosed by ideas, do we not? For instance, you are told by your parents and your teachers what is right and what is wrong. You know what people say, what the priest says, what tradition says, and what you have learned in school. All this forms a kind of enclosure within which you live; and, living in that enclosure, you say you are free. Are you? Can a man ever be free as long as he lives in a prison?

So, one has to break down the prison walls of tradition. One has to experiment and discover on one’s own, and not merely follow somebody, however good, however noble and exciting that person may be, and however happy one may feel in his presence. What has significance is to be able to examine and not just accept all the values created by tradition, all the things that people have said are good, beneficial, worthwhile. The moment you accept, you begin to conform, to imitate; and conforming, imitating, following, can never make one free and happy.

Our elders say that you must be disciplined. Discipline is imposed upon you by yourself, and by others from outside. But what is important is to be free to think, to inquire, so that you begin to find out for yourself. To think deeply, to go into things and discover for oneself what is true, is very difficult; it requires alert perception, constant inquiry, and most people have neither the inclination nor the energy for that. They say, ‘You know better than I do; you are my guru, my teacher, and I shall follow you.’

So, it is very important that from the tenderest age you are free to find out, and are not enclosed by a wall of do’s and don’ts; for if you are constantly told what to do and what not to do, what will happen to your intelligence? You will be a thoughtless entity who just walks into some career, who is told by his parents whom to marry or not to marry; and that is obviously not the action of intelligence. You may pass your examinations and be very well off, you may have good clothes and plenty of jewels, you may have friends and prestige; but as long as you are bound by tradition, there can be no intelligence.

Surely, intelligence comes into being only when you are free to question, free to think out and discover, so that your mind becomes very active, very alert and clear. Then you are a fully integrated individual—not a frightened entity who, not knowing what to do, inwardly feels one thing and outwardly conforms to something different.

Intelligence demands that you break away from tradition and live on your own; but you are enclosed by your parents’ ideas and by the traditions of society. So there is a conflict going on inwardly, is there not? You are all young, but I don’t think you are too young to be aware of this. So there is an inward struggle going on; and as long as you do not resolve that struggle you are going to be caught in conflict, in pain, in sorrow, everlastingly wanting to do something and being prevented from doing it.

If you go into it very carefully you will see that discipline and freedom are contradictory, and that in seeking real freedom there is set going quite a different process which brings its own clarification so that you just do not do certain things.

While you are young it is very important that you be free to find out, and be helped to find out, what you really want to do in life. If you don’t find out while you are young, you will never find out, you will never be free and happy individuals. The seed must be sown now, so that you begin now to take the initiative.

On the road you have often passed villagers carrying heavy loads, have you not? Those poor women with torn and dirty clothes, with insufficient food, working day after day for a pittance—do you have any feeling for them? Or are you so frightened, so concerned about yourself, about your examinations, about your looks, about your saris, that you never pay any attention to them? Do you feel you are much better than they, that you belong to a higher class and therefore need have no regard for them? Don’t you want to help them? No? That indicates how you are thinking. Are you so dulled by centuries of tradition, by what your fathers and mothers say, so conscious of belonging to a certain class, that you do not even look at the villagers? Are you actually so blinded that you do not know what is happening around you?

It is fear—fear of what your parents will say, of what the teachers will say, fear of tradition, fear of life—that gradually destroys sensitivity, is it not? To be sensitive is to feel, to receive impressions, to have sympathy for those who are suffering, to have affection, to be aware of the things that are happening around you. When the temple bell is ringing, are you aware of it? Do you listen to the sound? Do you ever see the sunlight on the water? Are you aware of the poor people, the villagers who have been controlled, trodden down for centuries by exploiters? When you see a servant carrying a heavy carpet, do you give him a helping hand?

All this implies sensitivity. But, you see, sensitivity is destroyed when one is disciplined, when one is fearful or concerned with oneself. To be concerned about one’s looks, about one’s saris, to think about oneself all the time— which most of us do in some form or other—is to be insensitive, for then the mind and heart are enclosed and one loses all appreciation of beauty. To be really free implies great sensitivity. There is no freedom if you are enclosed by self-interest or by various walls of discipline. As long as your life is a process of imitation there can be no sensitivity, no freedom. It is very important, while you are here, to sow the seed of freedom, which is to awaken intelligence; for with that intelligence you can tackle all the problems of life.

FREEDOM BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

FREEDOM BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

George Bernard Shaw was a dramatist and critic. His work as a London newspaper critic of music and drama resulted in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. His famous plays include Arms and the Man, Candida and Man and Superman. His works present a fearless intellectual criticism, sugar-coated by a pretended lightness of tone. He rebelled against muddled thinking, and sought to puncture hollow pretensions.

What is a perfectly free person? Evidently a person who can do what he likes, when he likes, and where he likes, or do nothing at all if he prefers it. Well, there is no such person, and there never can be any such person. Whether we like it or not, we must all sleep for one third of our lifetime—wash and dress and undress—we must spend a couple of hours eating and drinking—we must spend nearly as much in getting about from place to place. For half the day we are slaves to necessities which we cannot shirk, whether we are monarchs with a thousand slaves or humble labourers with no servants but their wives. And the wives must undertake the additional heavy slavery of childbearing, if the world is still to be peopled.

These natural jobs cannot be shirked. But they involve other jobs which can. As we must eat we must first provide food; as we must sleep, we must have beds, and bedding in houses with fireplaces and coals; as we must walk through the streets, we must have clothes to cover our nakedness. Now, food and houses and clothes can be produced by human labour. But when they are produced they can be stolen. If you like honey you can let the bees produce it by their labour, and then steal it from them. If you are too lazy to get about from place to place on your own legs you can make a slave of a horse. And what you do to a horse or a bee, you can also do to a man or woman or a child, if you can get the upper hand of them by force or fraud or trickery of any sort, or even by teaching them that it is their religious duty to sacrifice their freedom to yours.

So beware! If you allow any person, or class of persons, to get the upper hand of you, he will shift all that part of his slavery to Nature that can be shifted on to your shoulders; and you will find yourself working from eight to fourteen hours a day when, if you had only yourself and your family to provide for, you could do it quite comfortably in half the time or less. The object of all honest governments should be to prevent your being imposed on in this way. But the object of most actual governments, I regret to say, is exactly the opposite. They enforce your slavery and call it freedom. But they also regulate your slavery, keeping the greed of your masters within certain bounds. When chattel slavery of the negro sort costs more than wage slavery, they abolish chattel slavery and make you free to choose between one employment or one master and another and this they call a glorious triumph for freedom, though for you it is merely the key of the street. When you complain, they promise that in future you shall govern the country for yourself. They redeem this promise by giving you a vote, and having a general election every five years or so.

At the election two of their rich friends ask for your vote and you are free to choose which of them you will vote for to spite the other—a choice which leaves you no freer than you were before, as it does not reduce your hours of labour by a single minute. But the newspapers assure you that your vote has decided the election, and that this constitutes you a free citizen in a democratic country. The amazing thing about it is that you are fool enough to believe them.

Now mark another big difference between the natural slavery of man to Nature and the unnatural slavery of man to man. Nature is kind to her slaves. If she forces you to eat and drink, she makes eating and drinking so pleasant that when we can afford it we eat and drink too much. We must sleep or go mad: but then sleep is so pleasant that we have great difficulty in getting up in the morning. And firesides and families seem so pleasant to the young that they get married and join building societies to realise their dreams. Thus, instead of resenting our natural wants as slavery, we take the greatest pleasure in their satisfaction. We write sentimental songs in praise of them. A tramp can earn his supper by singing Home, Sweet Home.

The slavery of man to man is the very opposite of this. It is hateful to the body and to the spirit. Our poets do not praise it: they proclaim that no man is good enough to be another man’s master. The latest of the great Jewish prophets, a gentleman named Marx, spent his life in proving that there is no extremity of selfish cruelty at which the slavery of man to man will stop if it be not stopped by law. You can see for yourself that it produces a state of continual civil war—called the class war—between the slaves and their masters, organised as Trade Unions on one side and Employers’ Federations on the other. Saint Thomas More, who has just been canonized, held that we shall never have a peaceful and stable society until this struggle is ended by the abolition of slavery altogether, and the compulsion of everyone to do his share of the world’s work with his own hands and brains, and not to attempt to put it on anyone else.

Naturally the master class, through its parliaments and schools and newspapers, makes the most desperate efforts to prevent us from realising our slavery. From our earliest years we are taught that our country is the land of the free, and that our freedom was won for us by our forefathers when they made King John sign Magna Charta (also spelt Carta)—when they defeated the Spanish Armada—when they cut off King Charles’s head—when they made King William accept the Bill of Rights—when they issued and made good the American Declaration of Independence—when they won the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar on the playing-fields of Eton—and when, only the other day, they quite unintentionally changed the German, Austrian, Russian, and Ottoman empires into republics.

When we grumble, we are told that all our miseries are our own doing because we have the vote. When we say ‘What good is the vote?’ we are told that we have the Factory Acts, and the Wages Boards, and free education, and the New Deal, and the dole; and what more could any reasonable man ask for? We are reminded that the rich are taxed a quarter—a third—or even a half and more of their incomes; but the poor are never reminded that they have to pay that much of their wages as rent in addition to having to work twice as long every day as they would need if they were free.

Whenever famous writers protest against this imposture—say Voltaire and Rousseau and Tom Paine in the eighteenth century, or Cobbett and Shelley, Karl Marx and Lassalle in the nineteenth, or Lenin and Trotsky in the twentieth—you are taught that they are atheists and libertines, murderers and scoundrels, and often it is made a criminal offence to buy or sell their books. If their disciples make a revolution, England immediately makes war on them and lends money to the other Powers to join her in forcing the revolutionists restore the slave order. When this combination was successful at Waterloo, the victory was advertised as another triumph for British freedom; and the British wage-slaves, instead of going into mourning like Lord Byron, believed it all and cheered enthusiastically. When the revolution wins, as it did in Russia in 1922, the fighting stops; but the abuse, the calumnies, the lies continue until the revolutionised State grows into a firstrate military power. Then our diplomatists, after having for years denounced the revolutionary leaders as the most abominable villains and tyrants, have to do a right turn and invite them to dinner.

Now, though this prodigious mass of humbug is meant to delude the enslaved masses only, it ends in deluding the master class much more completely. A gentleman whose mind has been formed at a preparatory school for the sons of gentlemen, followed by a public school and university course, is much more thoroughly taken in by the falsified history and dishonest political economy and the snobbery taught in these places than any worker can possibly be, because the gentleman’s education teaches him that he is a very fine fellow, superior to the common run of men whose duty it is to brush his clothes, carry his parcels, and earn his income for him, and as he thoroughly agrees with this view of himself, he honestly believes that the system which has placed him in such an agreeable situation and done such justice to his merits is the best of all possible systems, and that he should shed his blood, and yours, to the last drop in its defence. But the great mass of our rack-rented, underpaid, treated-as-inferiors cast-off-onthe-dole workers cannot feel so sure about it as the gentleman. The facts are too harshly against it. In hard times, such as we are now passing through, their disgust and despair sometimes lead them to kick over the traces, upset everything, and they have to be rescued from mere gangsterism by some Napoleonic genius who has a fancy for being an emperor, and who has the courage and brains and energy to jump at the chance. But the slaves who give three cheers for the emperor might just as well have made a cross on a British or American ballot paper as far as their freedom is concerned.

So far I have mentioned nothing but plain natural and historical facts. I draw no conclusions, for that would lead me into controversy, and controversy would not be fair when you cannot answer me back. I am never controversial over the wireless. I do not even ask you to draw your own conclusions, for you might draw some very dangerous ones, unless you have the right sort of head for it. Always remember that though nobody likes to be called a slave, it does not follow that slavery is a bad thing. Great men, like Aristotle, have held that the law and order and government would be impossible unless the persons the people have to obey are beautifully dressed and decorated, robed and uniformed, speaking with a special accent, travelling in first-class carriages or the most expensive cars, or on the best-groomed and best-bred horses, and never cleaning their own boots, not doing anything for themselves that can possibly be done by ringing a bell and ordering some common person to do it. And this means, of course, that they must be made very rich without any obligation other than to produce an impression of almost godlike superiority on the minds of common people. In short, it is contended, you must make men ignorant idolaters before they will become obedient workers and law-abiding citizens.

To prove this, we are reminded that, although nine out of ten voters are common workers, it is with the greatest difficulty that a few of them can be persuaded to vote for the members of their own class. When women were enfranchised and given the right to sit in Parliament, the first use they made of their votes was to defeat all the women candidates who stood for the freedom of the workers and had given them years of devoted and distinguished service. They elected only one woman—a titled lady of great wealth and exceptionally fascinating personality.

Now this, it is said, is human nature, and you cannot change human nature. On the other hand, it is maintained that human nature is the easiest thing in the world to change if you catch it young enough, and that the idolatry of the slave class and the arrogance of the master class are themselves entirely artificial products of education and of a propaganda that plays upon our infants long before they have left their cradles. An opposite mentality could, it is argued, be produced by a contrary education and propaganda. You can turn the point over in your mind for yourself; do not let me prejudice you one way or the other.

The practical question at the bottom of it all is how the income of the whole country can best be distributed from day to day. If the earth is cultivated agriculturally in vast farms with motor ploughs and chemical fertilisers, and industrially in huge electrified factories full of machinery that a girl can handle, the product may be so great that an equal distribution of it would provide enough to give the unskilled labourers as much as the managers and the men of the scientific staff. But do not forget, when you hear tales of modern machinery enabling one girl to produce as much as a thousand men could produce in the reign of good Queen Anne, that this marvelous increase includes things like needles and steel pins and matches, which we can neither eat nor drink nor wear. Very young children will eat needles and matches eagerly—but the diet is not a nourishing one. And though we can now cultivate the sky as well as the earth, by drawing nitrogen from it to increase and improve the quality of our grass and, consequently, of our cattle and milk and butter and eggs, Nature may have tricks up her sleeve to check us if the chemists exploit her too greedily.

And now to sum up. Wipe out from your dreams of freedom the hope of being able to do as you please all the time. For at least twelve hours of your day Nature orders you to do certain things, and will kill you if you don’t do them. This leaves twelve hours for working; and here again Nature will kill you unless you either earn your living or get somebody else to earn it for you. If you live in a civilised country your freedom is restricted by the laws of the land enforced by the police, who oblige you to do this, and not to do that, and to pay rates and taxes. If you do not obey these laws the courts will imprison you, and, if you go too far, kill you. If the laws are reasonable and are impartially administered you have no reason to complain, because they increase your freedom by protecting you against assault, highway robbery, and disorder generally.

But as society is constituted at present, there is another far more intimate compulsion on you: that of your landlord and that of your employer. Your landlord may refuse to let you live on his estate if you go to chapel instead of to church, or if you vote for anyone but his nominee, or if you practise osteopathy, or if you open a shop. Your employer may dictate the cut, colour, and condition of your clothes, as well as your hours of work. He can turn you into the street at any moment to join the melancholy band of lost spirits called the Unemployed. In short, his power over you is far greater than that of any political dictator could possibly be. Your only remedy at present is the Trade Union weapon of the strike, which is only the old Oriental device of starving on your enemy’s doorstep until he does you justice. Now, as the police in this country will not allow you to starve in your employer’s doorstep, you must starve on your own—if you have one. The extreme form of the strike—the general strike of all workers at the same moment—is also the extreme form of human folly, as, if completely carried out, it would extinguish the human race in a week. And the workers would be the first to perish. The general strike is Trade Unionism gone mad. Sane Trade Unionism would never sanction more than one big strike at a time, with all the other trades working overtime to support it.

Now let us put the case in figures. If you have to work for twelve hours a day you have four hours a day to do what you like with, subject to the laws of the land, and your possession of money enough to buy an interesting book or pay for a seat at the pictures, or, on a half-holiday, at a football match, or whatever your fancy may be. But even here Nature will interfere a good deal, for, if your eight hours’ work has been of a hard physical kind, and when you get home you want to spend your four hours in reading my books to improve your mind, you will find yourself fast asleep in half a minute, and your mind will remain in its present benighted condition.

I take it, then, that nine out of ten of us desire more freedom, and that this is why we listen to wireless talks about it. As long as we go on as we are—content with a vote and a dole—the only advice we can give one another is that of Shakespeare’s Iago: ‘Put money in thy purse.’ But as we get very little money into our purses on pay-day, and all the rest of the week other people are taking money out of it, Iago’s advice is not very practical. We must change our politics before we can get what we want; and meanwhile we must stop gassing about freedom, because the people of England in the lump don’t know what freedom is, never having had any. Always call freedom by its old English name of leisure, and keep clamouring for more leisure and more money to enjoy it in return for an honest share of work. And let us stop singing Rule, Britannia! until we make it true. Until we do, let us never vote for a parliamentary candidate who talks about our freedom and our love of liberty, for, whatever political name he may give himself, he is sure to be at bottom an Anarchist who wants to live on our labour without being taken up by the police for it as he deserves.

And now suppose we at last win a lot more leisure and a lot more money than we are accustomed to. What are we going to do with them? I was taught in my childhood that Satan will find mischief still for idle hands to do. I have seen men come into a fortune and lose their happiness, their health, and finally their lives by it as certainly as if they had taken daily doses of rat poison instead of champagne and cigars. It is not at all easy to know what to do with leisure unless we have been brought up to it. I will, therefore, leave you with a conundrum to think over. If you had your choice, would you work for eight hours a day and retire with a full pension at forty-five, or would you rather work four hours a day and keep on working until you are seventy? Now don’t send the answer to me, please talk it over with your wife.

ONE CENTIMETRE BY BI SHU-MIN

ONE CENTIMETRE BY BI SHU-MIN

Bi Shu-min has been serving her country, China, as a doctor for over twenty years. She also has a Master’s degree in literature from the Beijing Teacher’s College. Bi Shu-min is one of the best known writers currently working in China. Her works have been translated into many languages. She has won innumerable literary awards both in China and in Taiwan. ‘One Centimetre’ is a fine example of a mature artist working at the height of her powers.

When Tao Ying rides on the bus alone, quite often she does not bother to buy a ticket.

Why should she? Without her, the bus would still be stopping at every stop, a driver and a conductor would still have to be employed, and the same amount of petrol used.

Clearly Tao Ying has to be astute. When the bus conductor looked like the responsible type, she would buy a ticket as soon as she got on board. But if he appeared to be casual and careless, she would not dream of paying, considering it a small punishment for him and a little saving for herself.

Tao Ying works as a cook in the canteen of a factory. She spends all day next to an open fire, baking screwshaped wheat cakes with sesame butter.

Today she is with her son Xiao Ye. She follows him onto the bus. As the doors shut her jacket is caught, ballooning up like a tent behind her. She twists this way and that, finally wrenching herself free.

‘Mama, tickets!’ Xiao Ye says. Children are often more conscious of rituals than adults. Without a ticket in his hand, the ride doesn’t count as a proper ride.

On the peeling paint of the door somebody has painted the shape of a pale finger. It points at a number: 1.10 m.

Xiao Ye pushed through. His hair looks as fluffy as a bundle of straw—dry and without lustre. As a rule, Tao Ying is very careful with her purse, but she has never skimped on her child’s diet. Nonetheless the goodness in his food refuses to advance beyond his hairline. As a result Xiao Ye is healthy and clever, but his hair is a mess.

Tao Ying tries to smooth it down, as if she was brushing away topsoil to get to a firm foundation. She can feel the softness of her son’s skull, rubbery and elastic to the touch. Apparently there is a gap on the top of everyone’s head, where the two halves meet. If they don’t meet properly, a person can end up with a permanently gaping mouth. Even when the hemispheres are a perfect match, it still takes a while for them to seal. This is the door to life itself—if it remains open, the world outside will feel like water, flowing into the body through this slit. Every time Tao Ying happens upon this aperture on her son’s head, she would be overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility. It was she who had brought this delicate creature into the world after all. Although she senses her own insignificance in the world, that her existence makes no difference to anyone else, she also realises that to this little boy she is the centre of the universe and she must try to be the most perfect, flawless mother possible.

Between Xiao Ye’s round head and the tip of the painted digit setting out the height requirement for a ticket rests the beautiful slender fingers of Tao Ying. Since she is in contact with oil all day, her nails are shiny, glistening like the smooth curved back of a sea shell.

‘Xiao Ye, you are not quite tall enough, still one centimetre away,’ she tells him softly. Tao Ying does not come from a privileged background, and has not read very many books. But she likes to be gentle and gracious, to set an example for her son and make a good impression. This elevates her sense of self-worth and makes her feel like an aristocrat.

‘Mama! I’m tall enough, I’m tall enough!’ Xiao Ye shouts at the top of his voice, stamping on the floor as if it were a tin drum. ‘You told me the last time I could have a ticket the next time, this is the next time. You don’t keep your word!’ He looks up at his mother angrily.

Tao Ying looks down at her son. A ticket costs twenty cents. Twenty cents is not to be scoffed at. It can buy a cucumber, two tomatoes or, at a reduced price, three bunches of radishes or enough spinach to last four days. But Xiao Ye’s face is raised up like a half-open blossom, waiting to receive his promise from the sun.

‘Get in! Don’t block the entrance! This is not a train, where you stand from Beijing to Bao Ding. We’re almost at the next stop...!’ the conductor bellows.

Normally, an outburst like this would certainly have discouraged Tao Ying from buying a ticket. But today she says, ‘Two tickets, please.’ The fierce conductor has beady eyes. ‘This child is one centimetre short of requiring a ticket.

’ Xiao Ye shrinks, not just one but several centimetres— the need for a ticket has all of a sudden become interwoven with the pride of a small child. To be able to purchase self-esteem with twenty cents is something that can only happen in childhood and certainly no mother can resist an opportunity to make her son happy. ‘I would like to buy two tickets,’ she says politely.

Xiao Ye holds the two tickets close to his lips and blows, making a sound like a paper windmill. They had entered through the central doors of the bus, but alight towards the front. Here another conductor is poised to examine their tickets. Tao Ying thinks that this man can’t be very bright. What mother accompanied by a child would try to avoid paying the correct fare? However poor she would never have allowed herself to lose face in front of her own son.

She hands over the tickets nonchalantly. The conductor asks: ‘Are you going to claim these back?’ ‘No.’ In fact Tao Ying ought to have kept the tickets so that the next time there is a picnic or an outing at work she could use her bicycle and then claim back the fare with the stubs. Both she and her husband are blue-collar workers, and any saving would have been a help. But Xiao Ye is a smart boy, and might well question her aloud, ‘Mama, can we claim back tickets even when we are on a private outing?’ In front of the child, she would never lie.

It is exhausting to follow rules dictated by parental guide-books all the time, but Tao Ying is determined to be the ideal mother and create a perfect example for her son to look up to. She needs really to concentrate—living this way is not unlike carrying an audience with you wherever you go. But her actions are full of love and tenderness. For instance, whenever she eats a watermelon in front of Xiao Ye, she would take care not to bite too close to the rind even though she doesn’t actually think there is much difference between the flesh and the skin. True, the sweetness gradually diminishes as you work your way through the red towards the green, but every part of the melon is equally refreshing. In any case the skin of a melon is supposed to have a beneficial cooling effect, and is often used as medicine.

One day, she came across her son eating a melon in the same manner she did. When Xiao Ye looked up, Tao Ying could see a white melon seed stuck to his forehead. She was furious: ‘Who taught you to gnaw at a melon like that? Are you going to wash your face in it too?’ Xiao Ye was terrified. The small hand holding the melon began to tremble, but the big round eyes remained defiant.

Children are the best imitators in the world. From then on Tao Ying realised that if she wanted her son to behave as if he were the product of a cultured home, then she must concentrate and never fail in her own example. This was very difficult, like ‘shooting down aeroplanes with a small gun’—but with determination, she knew that nothing was impossible. With this clear objective in mind, Tao Ying found her life becoming more focused, more challenging.

Today she is taking Xiao Ye to visit a big temple. He has never seen the Buddha before. Tao Ying is not a believer and she does not intend to ask him to kow-tow. That is superstition, she knows.

The tickets cost five dollars a piece—these days even temples are run like businesses. Tao Ying’s ticket was a gift from Lao Chiang, who worked at the meat counter. The ticket was valid for a month, and today was the last day. Lao Chiang was one of those people who seemed to know everybody. Occasionally he would produce a battered coverless month-old magazine and say: ‘Seen this before? This is called the Big Reference, not meant for the eyes of the common people.’ Tao Ying had never seen anything like this before and wondered how such a small rag, smaller even than a regular newspaper, could be called a Big Reference. She asked Lao Chiang but he seemed confused. He said everybody called it that—perhaps if you were to take out the pages and laid them flat they would end up bigger than a normal newspaper. It seemed to make sense. Studying this publication written in large print, Tao Ying could see that it was full of speculation about the war in the Middle East. Foremost on everyone’s mind seemed to be whether the export of dates from Iraq to China would continue as it did in the sixties during the famine. In any case, Tao Ying was full of admiration for Lao Chiang. In return for her indiscriminate respect, Lao Chiang decided to reward her with a ticket for the temple. ‘Is there just the one?’ Tao asked, not without gratitude but with some uncertainty. ‘Forget your husband, take your son and open his eyes! Children under 110 centimeters do not need a ticket. If you don’t want to go, sell it at the door and you’ll earn enough to buy a couple of watermelons!’ Lao Chiang had always been a practical man.

Tao Ying decided to take the day off and go on an outing with Xiao Ye.

It is rare to find such a large patch of grass in the middle of the city. Even before they got there, there was something refreshing, something green in the air, as if they were approaching a valley, or a waterfall.

Xiao Ye snatches the ticket from his mother’s hand, puts it between his lips, and flies towards the gilded gates of the temple. A little animal rushing to quench his thirst. Tao Ying suddenly feels a little sad. Is the mere attraction of a temple enough for Xiao Ye to abandon his mother? But almost immediately she banishes the thought— hasn’t she brought her son here today to make him happy? The guard at the gate is a young man dressed in a red top and black trousers.

Tao Ying feels somehow that he ought to have been in yellow. This uniform makes him look somewhat like a waiter. Xiao Ye knows exactly what he has to do. Moving amongst the crowd, he seems like a tiny drop of water in the current of a large river. The young man takes the ticket from his mouth, plucking a leaf from a spring branch. Tao Ying’s gaze softly envelopes her son, a strand of silk unwinding towards him, following his every gesture.

‘Ticket.’ The youth in red bars her way with one arm, his voice as pithy as if he was spitting out a date stone. Tao Ying points at her son with infinite tenderness. She feels that everybody should see how lovely he is. ‘I am asking for your ticket.’ The red youth does not budge.

‘Didn’t the child just give it to you?’ Tao Ying’s voice is peaceful. This boy is too young, years away from being a father, she thinks. Tao Ying is not working today and is in a really good mood. She is happy to be patient.

‘That was his ticket, now I need to see yours.’ The youth remains unmoved.

Tao Ying has to pause for a moment before it sinks in—there are two of them and they need a ticket each. ‘I thought that children were exempt?’ She is confused.

‘Mama, hurry up!’ Xiao Ye shouts to her from inside the doors. ‘Mama is coming!’ Tao Ying shouts back. A crowd is beginning to gather, so many fishes swarming towards a bright light.

Tao Ying starts to panic. She wants this fracas to end, her child is waiting for her. ‘Who told you he doesn’t need a ticket?’ The guard tilts his head—the more onlookers the better. ‘It says so on the back of the ticket.’ ‘Exactly what does it say?’ This boy is obviously not a professional.

‘It says that children under 110 centimetres do not have to pay.’ Tao Ying is full of confidence. She moves to pick up one of the tickets from a box next to the guard and reads out what is printed on the back for all to hear. ‘Stop right there!’ The youth has turned nasty. Tao Ying realises she should not have touched the box and quickly withdraws her hand. ‘So you are familiar with the rules and regulations are you?’ Now the young man addresses her with the formal ‘you’. Tao Ying detects the sarcasm in his tone but she simply nods.

‘Well, your son is over 110 centimetres,’ he says with certainty. ‘No he isn’t.’ Tao Ying is still smiling. Everybody begins to look at the mother with suspicion. ‘He just ran past the mark. I saw it clearly.’ The guard is equally firm, pointing at a red line on the wall which looks like an earthworm inching across the road after a rainstorm.

‘Mama, why are you taking so long? I thought I had lost you!’ Xiao Ye shouts to her affectionately. He runs towards his mother, as if she was one of his favourite toys. The crowd titters. Good, they think, here is proof, the whole matter can be cleared up at once.

The youth is getting a little nervous. He is just doing his job. He is certain he is right. But this woman seems very confident, perhaps that would be awful...

Tao Ying remains calm. In fact, she feels a little smug. Her son loves excitement. This is turning into something of an event so it is bound to delight him. ‘Come over here,’ the youth commands. The crowd holds its breath. Xiao Ye looks at his mother.

Tao Ying gives him a little nod. He walks over to the guard graciously, coughs a little, adjusts his jacket. In front of the gaze of the crowd, Xiao Ye is every inch the hero as he approaches the earthworm. Then—the crowd looks, and sees—the worm comes to Xiao Ye’s ear. How is this possible?

Tao Ying is by his side in two paces. The flat of her hand lands heavily on the little boy’s head, making a sound as crisp as a ping-pong ball popping underfoot. Xiao Ye stares at his mother. He is not crying. He is shocked by the pain. He has never been hit before. The crowd draws its breath. ‘Punishing a child is one thing, hitting him on the head is totally unacceptable!’

‘What a way for a mother to behave! So what if you have to buy another ticket? This is a disgrace, hitting a child to cover up your own mistake!’ ‘She can’t be his natural mother...’ Everybody has an opinion. Tao Ying is feeling a little agitated now. She had not meant to hit Xiao Ye. She meant to smooth down his hair, But she realises that even if Xiao Ye were bald at this instant, he would still be towering above the worm on the wall.

‘Xiao Ye, don’t stand on tip-toe!’ Tao Ying’s voice is severe. ‘Mama, I’m not...’ Xiao Ye begins to cry. It’s true. He isn’t. The worm crawls somewhere next to his brow.

The guard stretches himself lazily. His vision is sharp he has caught quite a few people who had tried to get through without paying. ‘Go get a ticket!’ he screams at Tao Ying. All pretence of courtesy has by now been eaten up by the worm.

‘But my son is less than one meter ten!’ Tao Ying insists even though she realises she stands alone. ‘Everyone who tries to escape paying always says the same thing. Do you think these people are going to believe you, or are they going to believe me? This is a universally accepted measurement. The International Standard Ruler is in Paris, made of pure platinum. Did you know that?’ Tao is flummoxed. All she knows is that to make a dress she needs two metres eighty centimetres, she does not know where the International Ruler is kept. She is only astonished at the power of the Buddha which can make her son grow several centimetres within minutes! ‘But we were on the bus just now and he wasn’t as tall...’ ‘No doubt when he was born he wasn’t as tall either!’ the youth sneers, chilling the air.

Standing in the middle of the jeering crowd, Tao Ying’s face has turned as white as her ticket.

‘Mama, what is happening?’ Xiao Ye comes away from the earthworm to hold his mother’s frozen hand with his own little warm one.

‘It’s nothing. Mama has forgotten to buy a ticket for you.’ Tao Ying can barely speak. ‘Forgotten? That’s a nice way of putting it! Why don’t you forget you have a son as well?’ The youth will not forgive her calm confidence of a moment ago. ‘What more do you want?’ Tao Ying’s temper rises. In front of her child, she must preserve her dignity.

‘You have a nerve! This is not to do with what I want, clearly you must apologise! God knows how you had managed to get hold of a complimentary ticket in the first place. To get in free is not enough, now you want to sneak in an extra person. Have you no shame? Don’t think you can get away with this, go, get yourself a valid ticket!’ The youth is now leaning on the wall, facing the crowd as if he is pronouncing an edict from on high.

Tao Ying’s hands are trembling like the strings on a pei-pa. What should she do? Should she argue with him? She is not afraid of a good fight but she doesn’t want her child to be witness to such a scene. For the sake of Xiao Ye, she will swallow her pride. ‘Mama is going to buy a ticket. You wait here, don’t run off.’ Tao Ying tries to smile. This outing is such a rare occasion, whatever happens she mustn’t spoil the mood. She is determined to make everything all right.

‘Mama, did you really not buy a ticket?’ Xiao Ye looks at her, full of surprise and bewilderment. The expression on her child’s face frightens her. She cannot buy this ticket today! If she went ahead, she would never be able to explain herself to her son. ‘Let’s go!’ She gives Xiao Ye a yank. Thankfully the child has strong bones, or his arm might have fallen off.

‘Let’s go and play in the park.’ Tao Ying wants her son to be happy, but the little boy has fallen silent, sullen. Xiao Ye has suddenly grown up.

As they walk past an ice-cream seller, Xiao Ye says, ‘Mama, give me money!’

Taking the money, Xiao Ye runs towards an old woman behind the stall and says to her: ‘Please measure me!’ It is only then that Tao Ying notices the old lady sitting next to a pair of scales for measuring weight and height. The old woman extends with difficulty the measuring pole, pulling it out centimetre by centimetre. She strains to make out the numbers: ‘One metre eleven.’

Tao Ying begins to wonder if she has encountered a ghost or is her son beginning to resemble a shoot of bamboo, growing every time you look at him?

Something moist begins to glisten in Xiao Ye’s eyes. Leaving his mother behind and without a backward glance, he starts to run away. He trips. One moment he is in the air, taking flight like a bird, another and he has dropped to the ground with a heavy thud. Tao Ying rushes over to lend a hand but just as she is about to reach him Xiao Ye has picked himself up and is off again. Tao Ying stops in her tracks. If she gives chase Xiao Ye will only keep falling. Watching her son’s vanishing silhouette, her heart begins to break: Xiao Ye, aren’t you going to look back at your mother? Xiao Ye runs for a long time and eventually comes to a halt. He throws a quick glance backwards to find his mother, but the moment he can see her, he takes off once more...

Tao Ying finds the whole incident incomprehensible. She wanders back to the old woman and asks politely: ‘Excuse me, these scales you have...’

‘My scales are here to make you happy! Don’t you want your son to grow tall? Every mother wants her sons to shoot up, but don’t forget when he is tall, that means you’ll be old! Mine are flattering scales,’ the old woman explains kindly, but Tao Ying remains baffled.

‘You see my scales are old and not very accurate and they make people seem lighter than they really are. I have also adjusted it to make them seem taller. These days it is fashionable to be long and lean—mine are fitness scales!’ The old woman might be kind, but she is not without cunning. So that is the reason!

Xiao Ye should have heard this speech! But he is a long way away and in any case would he have understood the convoluted logic? Xiao Ye still looks suspicious, as if mother has turned into a big bad wolf, ready to eat him up. Later when they are back at home, Tao Ying takes out her own tape measure and insists on measuring him again.

‘I don’t want to! Everybody says I am tall enough except you. It’s because you don’t want to buy me a ticket, don’t think I don’t know. If you measure me I am bound to get shorter again. I don’t trust you! I don’t trust you!’

The yellow tape in Tao Ying’s hands has turned into a poisonous viper.

‘Chef! Your cakes look as if they are wearing camouflage uniforms, all black and brown!’ a customer queuing in front of her counter shouts out.

The cakes are ruined. They are full of burnt marks, and look like tiny terrapins,

Sorry sorry sorry.

Tao Ying feels very guilty. She is usually very conscientious in her work, but these couple of days she often finds herself distracted.

She must rescue the situation! At night, after Xiao Ye has gone to sleep, Tao Ying straightens his little legs so that he is lying as flat as a piece of newly shrunken fabric. Tao Ying then stretches her tape from the soles of his feet to the top of his head—one metre nine centimetres.

She decides to write a letter to the administrators at the temple. She picks up her brush but suddenly realises that this is harder than she thinks! Seeing her deep in thought with knitted brows, her husband says, ‘So what do you imagine might happen even if you wrote to them?’

He is right, she doesn’t know if anything would come of it. But in order to melt the ice in her son’s eyes, she must do something.

At last the letter is done. There is a man in the factory nicknamed ‘the Writer’. People say he has had some small articles published at the back of a news rag once. Tao Ying finds him and respectfully offers up her literary work. ‘This sounds like an official communication. Not lively enough, not moving.’ The Writer traces the letter with his nicotine-stained fingers.

Tao Ying doesn’t know what an official communication is but she detects a tone of dissatisfaction in the scholar’s voice. She looks at the lines he is pointing to, and nods in agreement. ‘What you need to do is this. You must open with a strong and righteous claim, fawned by a passage of stunning originality so that your work stands out and grabs the attention of the editor. This would make him pick it out of a large pile on his desk. It has to catch his eyes like a blinding light, an apple in a mound of potatoes. But most important of all, your letter must touch his heart. Have you heard of the saying, grieving soldiers always win?’ Tao Ying keeps nodding.

The Writer is encouraged to continue: ‘Let us look at the opening paragraph—it should go something like this: ‘‘The power of the Buddha is surely infinite! The foot of a five-year-old boy has scarcely touched the threshold of the temple and he has grown two centemetres; but alas, the power of the Buddha is finite after all—on his return home the boy shrinks back to his original size...’’ I know this is not yet perfect, but have a think about it along these lines...’

Tao Ying tries to memorise the words of the Writer, but she finds it hard to recall all of it. Back home she makes a few corrections as best she can, and sends out the letter.

The Writer comes by her stall at lunch-time. Tao Ying’s face is framed in a small window where she is collecting vouchers. She looks like a photograph, staring out at the camera with a sombre expression. ‘Please wait a moment,’ and she disappears behind the frame. The Writer suspects the cakes are burnt again. Perhaps Tao Ying has gone to find a few which are less burnt than others, to thank him for pointing her in the right direction. ‘This is for you, with extra sugar and sesame,’ Tao Ying says shyly. This is the greatest gift a baker could offer a friend as a token of gratitude.

Then comes the long wait. Tao Ying looks through the newspapers every day, reading everything from cover to cover including small classified advertisements for videos. In the meantime she would listen to the radio, imagining that one morning she will hear her own letter read out by one of those announcers with a beautiful voice. Afterwards she would go down to the post office, in case the administrative department of the temple has replied to her letter, apologising for their misdeed... She has imagined a hundred different scenarios, but not what actually happens. The days have been like the white flour she works with, one very much like another. Xiao Ye appears to have recovered from the ordeal but Tao Ying firmly believes that he has not really forgotten.

Finally, one day, she hears a question, ‘Which way is it to comrade Tao’s home?’

‘I know, I’ll take you.’ Xiao Ye excitedly shows two elderly gentlemen in uniform through the front door. ‘Mama, we have visitors!’

Tao Ying is doing the laundry, immersed in soap up to her armpits.

‘We are from the administrative office at the temple. The local newspaper has forwarded your letter to us and we have come to ascertain the truth.’ Tao Ying is very nervous, and somewhat depressed. Chiefly because her house is very messy, and she has not had the time to tidy up. If they think that she is prone to laziness they might not believe her. ‘Xiao Ye, why don’t you go out to play?’ In Tao Ying’s fantasies,

Xiao Ye would be in the room to witness the revelation of the truth. Now that the moment has finally arrived, she feels uncomfortable having him there. She cannot predict what will happen. These are after all the people who employed the youth in red, so how reasonable can they be?

The younger of the two speaks. ‘We have investigated the matter with the party concerned, and he insisted he was in the right. Don’t tell the boy to leave, we want to measure him.’ Xiao Ye obeys and stands next to the wall. The white of the wall looks like a virgin canvas and Xiao Ye a painting filling up the space. He leans tightly against the wall as if the act of measuring his height has once again stirred up some terrifying memory in the recesses of his mind. The men are very serious. First of all they draw a bold line across the wall from the top of Xiao Ye’s head. Then they take out a metallic tape and take the measurement from the line to the floor.

The metal of the tape glistens like a flowing stream in sunlight. Tao Ying regains her calm. ‘What does it say?’ ‘One metre ten, just so,’ the younger man answers.

‘This is not just so. There was a delay of one month and nine days before you came. A month ago he wasn’t this tall.’

The two officials look at each other. This is a statement they cannot refute.

They produce a five-dollar bill from a pocket. The note pokes out of an envelope. They have evidently come prepared. Before they left the temple, they must have checked the height of the earthworm, and realised it was not drawn accurately.

‘The other day you and your son were unable to enter. This is a small token to redress the situation.’ This time it is the elder of the two gentlemen who speaks. His demeanour is kind, so he must be the more senior of the two.

Tao Ying remains still. That day’s happiness can never be bought again. ‘If you don’t want the money, here are two tickets. You and your son are welcome to visit the temple any time.’ The younger man is even more polite. This is a tempting proposition indeed, but Tao Ying shakes her head. To her, to her son, that place will always be associated with unhappy memories now.

‘So which would you prefer,’ both men ask in unison. In fact Tao Ying is asking herself the same question. She is gracious by nature—if the youth in red had come in person to apologise today, she would not have made him feel awkward. So what is it that she wants?

She shoves Xiao Ye in front of the two elderly officials. ‘Say Grandpa,’ she tells him. ‘Grandpa.’ Xiao Ye sounds infinitely sweet. ‘Dear Leaders, please take back the money, and the tickets. Kindly do not punish the guard on duty, he was only doing his job...

’ The two officials are puzzled. Tao Ying nudges Xiao Ye closer: ‘Gentlemen, would you be so kind as to explain to my son exactly what happened on that day. Please tell him that his mother has not done anything wrong...’