I’m sure all of the boys on Golding’s island would have agreed. An equally disturbing postscript emerged years after the Sherifs had written up their experiment. They ran into one of the boys (now an adult) at a party. He remembered the camp vividly, but described it as ‘terrific.’ William Golding certainly recognised this trait in human nature. During the final climactic hunt for Ralph, who the hunters are intending to spear and decapitate, the boys are described as cheering and laughing excitedly as they close in for the kill. I recall both the terror and the intense thrills of the neighbourhood games of ‘War’ we used to play as children. Everyone in the vicinity would gather, divide into two teams and scatter through the bush on the rural fringe of Sydney where we lived. The rules were simple: hunt down and capture the enemy, no head wounds. (We knew from experience that head-wounds meant parental involvement. A guaranteed buzz-kill.) I can still feel the frozen, delicious fear of near discovery – hiding behind the waterfall in the creek. And the joy of chasing down and catching one of the younger boys. One day, aged about seven, and ignominiously captured by a number of boys, I was tied up – not to a tree, but in a tree – with thick, scratchy rope. Attempting to escape and rejoin my tribe, I wiggled around so much that the rope slipped around my neck. Alone, spluttering, half choked and semi-hanging in a tree, I barely managed to escape. After climbing down from the tree with a bruised throat, I raced off to rejoin the fray, barely giving it a second thought. Perhaps as children we play war, and its innocuous cousin, hide-and-seek, to prepare ourselves for the violence that has almost certainly stalked most of mankind’s history. Lord of the Flies is a roadmap for the decay of a small group cut off from social constraints and an artificial conscience. Golding knew that the seeds for this kind of aberrant behaviour are lurking in all of us, regardless of our race, breeding or nationality. He understood just because we are ‘civilised’ doesn’t mean we will be civil to others when the moral shackles are removed. Ultimately the strongest and most enduring message I took away from Lord of the Flies was that almost no one is immune to these forces under the right circumstances. Most of us think we would never do anything similar if ship-wrecked on an uninhabited island, or trapped down a mine, or lost in the wilderness on a camping trip. But those who have lived through these kinds of situations know the truth. Samuel Avalos, a survivor from the 2010 Chilean mine collapse, spoke later of the critical need for cooperation and rules in a stranded group; ‘It’s a form of self-protection. It’s not about looking after your mates. No...you fuck them over if you can. It’s about protecting yourself because you turn into something else down there.’ In Lord of the Flies, William Golding displays his profound understanding of this concept. I’m sure he knew the true location of the Beast. The fact that Golding wanted to call his novel Strangers from Within speaks for itself. •
Email – sydbetts@iprimus.com.au Read more about No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality by Eleanor Learmonth & Jenny Tabakoff. (Text Publishing). http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-authors/book/no-mercy/.
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