The vertical ladder ~ William Sansom
The vertical ladder ~ William Sansom
The Vertical Radder is a peculiar story of a boy named Flegg.
Without giving it a second thought, he takes the challenge to climb the ladder.
And this was to impress a girl.
The story begins with the regret of Flegg climbing the ladder.
He realized the impossible events, which had thrust him upon this precious climb.
There he was isolated on a vertical ladder, flat to the side of a gasometer.
He was bound to climb higher and higher until he reached the vertiginous skyward Summit.
The palms of his hands were moistening with sweat.
And his body felt heavier as he climbed up the rungs of the iron ladder.
He regrets to himself how he could take such an irresponsible step.
He regrets he would give the very hands, that ching the ladder for safe conduct to Solid Earth.
The writer says that it was a strong spring day, and became abruptly as warm as midsummer.
Flegg and his friends felt stuffed in their winter clothes.
They had wandered out from the park by a back gate, into the area of the back street.
About the weather, the writer said, 'The green glare of the new leaves everywhere struck the eyes too friendly'.
Sansom describes the area around. The houses were small and old Some seemed to be falling.
There were short streets, and narrow pavements and the only shop was of a tobacconist or a desolate corner oil shop to colour the grey. Sansom. says, perhaps, it was an outcrop of some industrial undertaking beyond.
At first, these quiet desert streets seemed more restful than the park, but as the houses ended, the ground opened to reveal the yards of disused gas work.
Flegg and his friends welcome the green nettles and milkwort that grew among that grew among the scrap iron and broken bricks.
They were five of them. Two boys, two girls and Flegg himself. They came and stood before the old gasometer.
This was the only erection, towering high, around hundreds of feet around.
So they started through bricks against the rusted side. The rust flew off its flakes and the iron rung dully.
Flegg wished to excel in the eyes of the dark-haired girl.
He began throwing bricks higher than the others. He felt the girl’s eye following his shoulders.
She seemed a wide-awake girl, who would be the first to appreciate an active sort of a man.
Flegg liked her earnest, purposeful expression.
She said, ‘bet you can’t climb as high as you throw.
Then began those uneasy jokes, innocent at first, that taken seriously can accumulate a hysterical accumulation of spite.
The writer says everyone recognises this unpleasantness. It is plainly felt but the jokes must be pressed forward, one becomes frightened.
One laughs all the louder, pressing to drown the embarrassment of danger and guilt.
The third boy instantly shouted: “Of course he can’t he can’t climb higher than himself”.
Flegg scoffed.
The girl pointed upwards.
Flegg accepted the challenge. The girl asked him to go. She gave her hanky saying, ‘Tie my flag to the top”.
Flegg wanted to laugh it out but the girl went by sterical.
So Flegg turned to the gasometer he thought it was not very high.
But it was not so. It was not just a rough mass of iron. Now every detail sprung out in the abrupt definition. He studied intently; the brown rusted iron sheeting smeared with red lead. The ladder scales the sides with the sheeting. The grid of girders, a complexity of struts.
There were two ladders. One of Jacob’s the other was more of a staircase, zigzagging. The belly of the gasometer.
Flegg thought this must have been erected later as a substitute for Jocob’s ladder.
Flegg rapidly assessing these structures, never stopped sauntering forward.
His friends gave encouraging abuse. “How I Climbed Mount Everest.” and that hell come down as he went up.
But the girl with a sense of guilt remained quiet.
Flegg had veered slightly towards the safer staircase. His footsteps veered in the direction of his eyes.
No one had noticed Jacob’s ladder. So Flegg thought he could use the staircase.
But the quick eyes of his friends saw it. They should, ‘No you don’t! Not up, those sissy stairs’.
Flegg shouted back, ‘Who is talking about stairs?’
His friends teased him saying. “He’s like a ruddy duck’s uncle without an aunt.
So Flegg realized there was no alternative. He had to climb the gasometer by the vertical ladder.
He consoled himself. The climb was not that to worry about. He thought many climb such ladders.
He smiled at his earlier perturbations.
The girl ran up to him, giving handkerchief, saying, this was his Flegg.
She also added that “You don't really have to go up! I believed you”.
He took her handkerchief and gave her a dramatic kiss, and started his climb.
He climbed some ten feet that might have corresponded to the top of a first-floor window. Then he started slowing up his climb.
He sensed distinctly that he was already unnaturally high.
The sensation of height infected him strongly. He had to maintain a balance.
He climbed: and then methodically he reached the ladder head.
Here he paused for a moment. He rested his knees against the last three steps.
The rust powdered off and smeared him with its red dust. He wanted to brush it away.
But, says the writer, ‘the impulse was, to his surprise, much less powerful, than the vice-like will, that clutched his hand to the iron support.
He had to shake off the rest with a jerk of his head.
He forced himself to laugh at this sudden fear. He pulled at the stanchions of the iron ladder. They were as firm as the rocks.
He looked up the gasometer seemed to be higher than before the blue sky descended. It seemed to be higher than before. The blue sky descended. It seemed the sky touched the gasometer.
The redness of the rust dissolved into a deepening grey shadow.
Flegg imagined that the entire erection had become unsteady. That the gasometer might suddenly blow over.
He lowered his eyes but his concentration as on his hands. Then he began to climb.
From beneath there still rose a few cries from the boys. The girl was silent. Perhaps she was admiring Flegg’s climb.
Now he noticed that the cries were coming from a distance: Flegg could not so easily distinguish their words.
He looked down, his friends were looking too small. He tried to wave them, but he could not. He turned to the rungs with a smile dying on his lips.
He continued to tread slowly upward.
Suddenly as though a catastrophe had overtaken him, In a second he realized he was afraid inconvertibly.
It seemed his hands began to feel moist, His hands gripped with pitiable eagerness they were at the point of shivering.
His feet no longer trod firmly on the rungs beneath. His body lost much of its poise. It seemed his body was moving with the dangerous unwilled of crippled limbs.
His body hung slack away from the ladder, with nothing beneath.
Only a thirty-foot drop to the ground.
For the first time, he felt what he attempted was impossible. He could never achieve the top.
At thirty feet it was so, what would be at sixty feet? He was afraid but not desperate. He believed in himself that it would be over it could not take a long time.
A memory crossed his mind. He remembered waking in the nursery and seeing the windows were lighted, as it reflected the moonlight.
He had crawled out of the bed and stood on the chair, below the window.
Outside there was a space, a limitless space, and yet this was not unnatural.
At first, it appeared an impossible infinity. A vast plain of still water continued, as far as his eyes could see.
Houses were submerged. In the light, an unseen moon winked and washed darkly, perhaps concealing great beasts of mystery beneath its black calm surface.
This water attracted him. He wished to jump in through the window.
He felt alone at the window, infinitely high. The flood seemed to lie in miniature at a great distance below.
Later in life, when he was ill, the objects in his bedroom grew small and infinitely remote in his feared reflection.
Isolated at the little window, he was frightened by the emptiness surrounding him.
He had been horrified, yet down by greed and desire. (Pum of ‘d’)
Then a battleship sailed by. He had woken up, saved by the appearance of the battleship.
And now at the ladder, he had a sudden hope that something as large and stable would intervene again to help him.
But farther up, he began to sweat more violently than ever.
His hands streamed with wet rust and the flesh inside his thighs blenched.
He felt physically exhausted. Fear was draining his strength. His body weighs more heavily with each step forward.
The wind blew faster. It dragged at his coat.
‘Don't look down’ the blood whispered in his temple.
Flegg grew desparate. The only thing he wanted was to reach the ground.
He looked down but couldn’t see for a long time. He quickly looked up again.
Tears were rolling down his cheeks and eyes. For a moment they reeled red with giddiness.
He closed his eyes but opened them quickly.
He feared something would happen.
A fade reason told him that the gasometer was firm and steady as a cliff.
But his horrified senses suspected that the whole edifice would go crashing on the ground.
This image becomes so clear that he could see the sheets folding like cloth sinking on the earth.
From this height, each object down seemed infinitely small.
He was now like a child. Lost on some monstrous desert of red rust.
These unfamiliarities shocked his nerves more than the danger of falling.
The sense of isolation was overpowering the danger of falling.
All things were suddenly alien
A commotion began below. A confusion of cries came drifting up to him.
Above all, he could hear the girl’s voice. She was shrilling all along she was quiet.
“Put it back, put it back” the screams seemed to say.
Flegg thought these cries were to warn him of some danger. Flegg gripped himself to the ladder.
He glanced down for a fractional second, and in this time, he saw enough.
The girl was screaming and pointing at the ladder, the painter’s ladder.
The ladder lay clearly on the ground, outlined white like a child’s drawing of a ladder.
The boys must have for fun removed the ladder.
Flegg considered quickly, descending but foresaw that they would jeer.
He noticed his friends were wandering off. They were more concerned with the girl than Flegg.
The girl’s sense of guilt made her terrified. Only she could sense the terror that awaited all.
But they were not concerned. They were abandoning him. He was alone and helpless in his wild prison of rust.
His heart cried out for help. He cried out to them to say.
An uneasy feeling lumped his throat, and his eyes smarted with dry tears.
But they wandered away. Flegg had no option but to climb higher.
Desperately, he tried to shake off his fears.
He lifted himself tentatively. He dragged himself …. until he must have been some ten rungs from the top.
He looked up to see the distance.
The sight of the top of the gasometer proved endemically more frightful than the appearance of the drop beneath.
There was not a sense of danger or a sense of falling.
But something inhumane- a sense of appalling isolation.
A wind blew around it, that had never known the warmth of flesh nor the softness of green fibers.
Its blind eyes raised above the world.
Sansom says, ‘it might have been eyeless iron vizor of ancient god”
It had risen in an awful perpendicular to this isolation, solitary.
(tell me the difference between ‘isolation’ and ‘solitary’) ?
Perhaps it makes the end of the northern world.
And in this summit, Flegg measured clearly the full distance of the climb.
He clearly saw a man falling beneath, spread-eagling to smash on the stone beneath.
The man turned slowly in the air, but his thoughts reached faster than the fall.
Flegg clutching his body close to the rust made small weeping sounds.
He began to tread again, working his knees and elbows outward like a frog.
He did so. so that his stomach could feel the firm rungs.
But were they firm?
He began to scramble whispering meaningless words to himself.
He reached the top rung. There was no ladder, no platform.
Flegg started dumbly, circling his head like a lost animal.
He jammed his legs in the lower rungs.
Here he hung shivering and past knowing, what more he could ever do…
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