The Go-Between: Prologue  Summary & Analysis

Leo Colston, a British man in his sixties, comes across a battered old collar-box full of belongings dating back to his childhood. Amongst its contents are “two dry, empty sea urchins; two rusty magnets; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil,” and, most significantly to him, his old diary. He feels the “almost mystical thrill of early ownership,” which is a feeling of which, at his age, he is somewhat “ashamed.”

The golden-edged diary looks like the only object of his that might have been expensive. Leo is hesitant to touch it, because he feels it will “challenge his memory.” He stares at it for a while, trying to remember the code to its combination lock. When he was young, Leo tells the reader, he would show off by pretending that he needed to be in a trance to open the diary’s lock.

Leo remembers the combination and unlocks the diary, but is still hesitant to touch it. He is fearful of its “message of disappointment and defeat”, events that he had been unable to “overcome.” He feels that “had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different.” He would be in a “rainbow-hued room” instead of the “drab, flowerless” one he is in now, “looking not into the past but into the future.” Furthermore, he wouldn’t be “sitting alone”.

Leo opens the diary—it’s for the year 1900. The year is ornately decorated by the signs of the Zodiac, a cosmology that held considerable power over him as a young boy. Leo remembers the “glorious” signs well, but also remembers that they no longer hold the same potency for him as they once did.

Leo describes the different zodiac signs on the diary. He sees the Ram, Bull, and Lion as representing “imperious manhood,” and lingers on the only expressly female sign of the galaxy, “the Virgin.” To Leo, she is “the key to the whole pattern, the climax, the coping-stone, the goddess.”

Leo recalls how significant the year 1900 seemed to him as a young boy. Back then, he would chant “nineteen hundred” to himself, seeing the end of the old century and beginning of the new as representative of “the expansion and ascension” of “some divine gas.” At the time, he believed it to be “the dawn of a Golden Age” and “infinitely precious.” He believed that the coming century was destined to be the “realization” of his “hopes.”

One aspect of the zodiac was jarring for young Leo: he couldn’t identify with the symbol that was supposed to be his own, the Lion (his birthday is in July). The two other candidates for Leo’s favorite sign were the Archer and the Water-carrier. He preferred the Archer, as it seemed more warrior-like and “romantic,” whereas the Water-carrier was too much like a “farm-laborer or at best a gardener.” The two signs “attracted and repelled Leo” in equal measure.

The young Leo had felt a pressure that the diary must “record something worthwhile.” The present-day Leo flicks through the pages, most of which record banalities, such as: “Muffins, scones, cakes and strawberry jam.” One entry records the victory in a football match between Leo’s school and a rival: “Lambton House VANQUISHED 2-1!!!! McClintock scored both goals!!!!”

Young Leo enjoyed having the diary, wanting to both keep it secret and for people to see its contents. He felt it would enhance his “prestige” for people to know of his secretive activity, but he didn’t especially want to share its contents. The diary’s frontispiece would frequently send him into daydreams about the zodiac and the twentieth century to come.

Perhaps because he was too public about having a diary, bullies at Leo’s school stole it from him. They picked up especially on his use of the word “vanquished,” and would beat Leo up, taunting him with the question, “are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?” This happened to Leo on a daily basis, but because of the code amongst his peers against “sneaking”—telling adults about misbehavior—he kept quiet.

Young Leo decided to take action against his bullies. He got the diary back, covered in insults written by his enemies. But these were written in pencil, and he duly rubbed them out. Knowing that he couldn’t match their physical strength, Leo decided to write three curses in his diary to get revenge on his bullies (whose names were Jenkins and Strode). He wrote them in blood, not completing the third curse because—Leo believed—it would mean the death of Jenkins and Strode.

Older Leo feels that the written curses “breathe malevolence” and “pluck a superstitious nerve” even now. He is envious of his former self for taking action and gaining respect for doing so. He recalls that he left the diary, now containing the curses, somewhere he knew his bullies would see it.

The bullies mocked Leo even more for the curses. They poked him in the eyes and that night Leo shed tears over their treatment of him for the first time. His roommates at school showed him the cursory kindness of not acknowledging his crying after lights out (rather than teasing him or telling anyone about it).

But the next day it appeared that the curse had worked: Jenkins and Strode fell off the school roof and were hospitalized. Leo’s fellow students had a new respect for him and offered their congratulations. It turned out they generally didn’t like Jenkins and Strode either. Furthermore, because word had gotten around about the curses, the rest of the school feared Leo’s powers.

Young Leo then became an authority on black magic and code-making, even charging his schoolmates for his expertise. He began to dream about being a great writer, “perhaps the greatest writer of the greatest century, the twentieth.” He was often asked the meaning of the curses’ text, but he himself didn’t really know and maintained the air of secrecy.

Present-day Leo turns the pages of the diary. February, March, April, May and June all account for those happy days in the aftermath of the successful curses (and the Easter holidays). He comes to July, and under Monday the 9th is written “Brandham Hall.” For that day and those that follow there is a temperature recording, e.g. “Thursday 26th. 80.7 degrees.”

The 26th is the last entry in the diary—Leo knew the rest of the pages were blank. Though it is later than his usual bedtime, Leo feels the past, specifically the events of that July, stirring within him. He has suppressed their memory for years, but always knew they remained intact within him, “carefully embalmed.”

Leo reflects on his life since those fateful July days. He had made a “working arrangement” with life, on the condition that there should be no “exhumation” of the memories of Brandham Hall. Leo reflects that part of the reason that he couldn’t deal with what happened at Brandham Hall is that he did not understand its world (as opposed to the world of his school). The people at Brandham intimidated him then and still do now: “they had zodiacal properties and proportions. They were, in fact, the substance of my dreams, the realization of my hopes; they were the incarnated glory of the twentieth century.”

Leo imagines a conversation between him in the present day and his younger self. The young Leo chastises him for being “such a dull dog” and not emulating the zodiac signs—the Ram, the Bull, and the Lion, and “above all” the Virgin.

Leo answers his younger self, saying that the latter had been burned after flying “too near to the sun.” He believes that the man he is today is what his younger self made him. His younger self argues that he has had “half a century” to take control of his life, in the “glorious epoch” of the twentieth century no less. Present-day Leo argues that the twentieth century has not delivered on the promise of being a new dawn in the way that his younger self so excitedly anticipated. He tells his younger self that he was, in fact, “vanquished.”

Leo’s younger self argues that he could at least have tried to deal with the challenges of life, as he had with Jenkins and Strode all those years ago. Leo argues that his younger self was wrong to think of the people at Brandham Hall “as angels, even if they were fallen angels. They belonged to your Zodiac.” What his younger self should have done, thinks Leo, is called down curses on “Mrs. Maudsley or her daughter or Ted Burgess or Trimingham.” Present-day Leo hasn’t thought of those people since his youth because he felt that was what his younger self wanted.

The voice of his younger self, as it dies away, implores Leo to write down the events at Brandham Hall before it is too late. Leo knows now that he has to face those memories. Surrounded by his piles of papers, he picks up the diary again. He reveals that the combination of letters to open the lock is his own name: “LEO.”