An Unfamiliar Encounter

I suppose we all experience, at some time or another, a single, unique moment in our life which changes us completely. Of course it varies from person to person, man to woman; whether it be the extraction of one’s first tooth, or the discovery of a new word, or the moment when one’s parents finally stopped screaming and parted company forever. One man, who I briefly became acquainted with during the course of one of many nights out roaming the streets of London, while in my second year at university, mentioned a certain incident that occurred when he was only in his seventh year of age.
We happened to be sitting upon the same bench outside a pub, which backed onto the Thames, called “The Sailors Hole”. Whether the name implied a hole owned by a single sailor, or a hole for putting a chap named Sailor in, or even the presence of a unique putting course exclusively for mariners, neither myself nor my fellow undergraduates knew. Nevertheless the house was a popular nest for penniless students (of which there were many). Inside, the scuffed dark wooden tables were surrounded by chairs of a similar wood, yet gaudily adorned with faded scarlet velvet, giving the room the appearance of a Victorian brothel. Besides its rather peculiar furniture, which after one or two visits became perfectly acceptable, the dim lighting and the presence of a well-stocked fire crackling away (it was the second most eye-catching feature of the place; the first being the furniture) gave the pub a pleasant and cosy atmosphere, enabling it to remain in tune with the stereotype which has made British pubs known throughout the world as centres of great activity and comfort.
In any case, I had abandoned the delights, laughter and cigarette smoke of the interior for a breath of fresh air. It was not the first time I had been driven from a room on account of my reluctance to take up that most disgusting of habits, but it was the first time that my breath of fresh air had resulted in such engaging company.
I sat on the bench and admired the filthy black cobbles around me. It was the rear of the pub which had the privilege of the river, leaving the front of the building the unappetising view of darkened alleys and soiled paving stones.
In the light from the pub windows I discerned an irregular bundle of clothes heaped untidily at the other end of the bench. They softly rose and fell with the regular pattern of a metronome. I turned back towards the impenetrable darkness before me, breathing in the familiar stench of London’s delightfully fresh and revitalising air. Thinking my lungs would be better suited inside and coated with tar, I rose my leaden legs to return to my fellows, but at that moment the formless bundle on the bench came alive with movement and uttered words so obscure that they long remained with me.
‘ “Stay! So to the shades of Memnon may his birds make their annual offering with customary slaughter.” ’
The brutality with which the words were spoken arrested my heart with fear and wonder. They seemed to bear little relevance to anything or anyone around us, yet he said them with such conviction that they sounded like a Shakespearean incantation. I stood paralysed as the shape slowly moulded into the figure of a small man who turned and looked up at me. He wore dark glasses (a fact which, in my semi-inebriated state, did not seem that important at the time) allowing a reflection of myself to gaze uncertainly up at me from the thick, opaque lenses. The black of the glasses contrasted vividly against his white hair which spread across his face in a snow-coloured beard.
‘I-I beg your pardon?’ I managed to stutter out under the unnerving stare of the little man who reminded me very much of Father Christmas.
‘Oh, no need of that,’ he said with slow deliberation. He turned away from me and peered curiously into the shadows in front of him. His brief distraction gave me the chance to survey him slightly more astutely. His beautiful white hair was guarded by a dirty tweed hat, with protective ear guards strangely reminiscent of that worn by Sherlock Holmes. He wore a thick green overcoat, which had clearly seen better days; I could not tell what lay beneath the folds of that coat, as he held it close to himself like a long-lost brother. His trousers took the form of a bedraggled pair of jeans; blue woollen mittens protected his fingers from the worst of the season’s weather; and on his feet were what appeared to be a pair of tartan slippers.
‘When you have finished admiring my clothing, do take a seat,’ he said without turning his head. I detected a peculiar tint to his speech, some dialect or other. He spoke methodically and matter-of-fact, allowing his sonorous voice (though a small man, he had a wonderful voice) to resound about him, while that familiar yet frustratingly unrecognisable tone shaping his words into a whole new language.
‘Ovid,’ he stated suddenly. I still hadn’t sat down.
‘What?’ I replied, trying not to sound rude.
‘What I just so eloquently quoted was a piece of Ovid.’ Could it have been Irish? The manner in which he caressed his vowels certainly reminded me of the soft and tender sounds of the Celtic languages. Ignoring my silence he continued.
‘Alas for the generations that have abandoned Classical literature.’ There was very little I could possibly say to such a statement, so I kept my silence. ‘A man once said to me that where we are now, with respect to science and technology, is credit to the strength of our foundations in Classical society. But why study these ancient, dead languages, you might ask-’ I could not have possibly asked as my mouth remained firmly shut. ‘-well, the fact of the matter is, if we can look back in time and understand the faults’ –“for-aults”- ‘and triumphs of a society as powerful as that built by the Caesars, we may turn a clearer and more incisive eye to our own society and perceive our own faults and triumphs.’ Here he stopped, as though pausing for breath; but he sat, calm as ever, gazing deeply into the darkness before him, his glasses giving nothing away.
‘Now why don’t you just sit down,’ he said. ‘You’re making me all shy and timid.’ I hastily sat down, but with enough grace so as not to make my fascination with this bearded fellow too obvious.
‘My name’s Snow,’ he said with the same philosophical tone of voice which he used in describing our roots in Classical civilisation.
‘Tom Parsons,’ I stiffly replied.
‘Well Tom, when I was six years old my father cut his eyes out with a kitchen knife.’ Shock! Horror! The very words themselves and the matter-of-fact way in which they were stated rendered me both physically and mentally paralysed. What could someone of my own meagre status say to such an acclamation? The traditional apology addressed to one who has suffered a grievance would sound hollow and awkward.
A dreadful silence now hung over us in all its saturated glory. Unwilling to let such an atmosphere of discomfort linger any longer than possible, I said the first thing that came to mind.
‘Why?’ Even a word as simple as this got caught in my throat on the way out.
‘My father later told me that he had seen such horrific things in his time, both in the war and in places he had visited around the world that he wanted just to be rid of the sights, the visions, the memories. Of course, he told me that once his eyes had been removed, the memories of what he had seen simply grew more vivid in his mind. Such is the irony of God’s will.’
‘The disdain with which these last words were growled out was the fist display of emotion I had seen from Snow since his opening sentence.
‘During the war,’ Snow continued in his melodious rumbling voice. ‘My father watched in horror as a friend of his from childhood lay gasping and gurgling next to him, while blood dripped from a bullet wound in his neck onto his exposed intestines, which he held with one hand, while the other felt beneath his waist in the gaps where his legs had been.
‘Another time, his squadron came across a deserted French village. They searched house to house for signs of life until they reached the church. It had been burnt to a cinder, and inside, flooding their nostrils with the scent of burnt flesh, rested the charred remains of the village’s population. They were too late; the Germans had got there before them. One night soon after he blinded himself I came across my father in bed, writhing in his dreams, all the while screaming: “We were too late! We were too late!” ’
Snow leant forward slightly, his head sunk on his chest, as though saying a respectful prayer in silence for those poor people. But he continued, a moment later, his voice unwavering.
‘He had also been t Africa, India, South America, and seen the destitution, the poverty, the disease. For the months after he returned he would remain subdued and thoughtful; it seemed nothing we could do would cheer him up in any way. His mind was full of the memories of girls who had barely entered puberty selling their bodies for a lousy meal or two. He remembered people, weakened by leprosy, writhing in their dirt-covered bandages, what few limbs them had left scratching at the sores which swarmed across their bodies, while all the time passers-by paid them no more attention that they would a sack of dung. He told me of mothers who would swap their babies so as not to go through the additional torment of killing their own child to feed the rest of the family. Millions around the world struggle daily to stay alive, while we simply wait to be served, and are impatient when it takes too long. Tell me, is that fair?’
I was a geography student, and the study of ethics could not be further from my field of familiarity. I replied with the superficial line which we all at some point utter in our lives, in an attempt to sound grateful and aware of the suffering of others; very few say the line with any real conviction, and they tend to be the ones who have been there and lived like that for a while at least.
‘It makes you realise how lucky you are.’
‘Ay, it does, Tom; ay, it does,’ he said, almost as an after thought. Still the impenetrable lenses of his dark glasses peered into the shadows before us. A great stillness and quiet had stolen over the night, almost as a mark of the gravity of Snow’s words. It felt as though we would sit there for the rest of the night, watching the darkness swirl around our feet, when all of a sudden Snow made a move. He clumsily rose from the bench and without another word awkwardly shuffled off down one of the unlit alleys before us. I sat there awhile, watching the patch of darkness his figure had melted into, thinking about all he had said. The discomfort with which his different subjects of conversation contrasted with each other enabled them to embed themselves in my memory all the more intently; and still, many years on, I find it impossible to rid myself of them.
Time passed serenely; I do not know how long I sat there, chewing on my thoughts, but at some point I sombrely lifted my much sobered self from the bench and with a final look, almost of farewell, into the darkness, I returned into the familiar hustle and bustle of student life.
From that day on I was a changed man. I began to look at situations differently, looking at them as I imagined Snow would have done. But after all these years, dissecting every word he had said, and finding as much meaning as it was possible to extract, there still remained one thing that unsettled me about our conversation. I could not put my finger on it at the time, but now, with years of experience under my belt, I realise that it was not his father Snow was talking about, it was himself.