BRIAN ALDISS

The Twinkling of an Eye

Or

My Life as an Englishman

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager in 2015

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (glasses on books); Mayang Murni Adnin (wood texture)

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 978-0-00-748258-0

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-748259-7

Version: 2015-07-01

Epigraph

If we apply to authors themselves for an account of their state, it will appear very little to deserve envy; for they have in all ages been addicted to complaint…Few have left their names to posterity, without some appeal to future candour from the perverseness and malice of their own times. I have, nevertheless, been often inclined to doubt, whether the authors, however querulous, are in reality more miserable than their fellow mortals.

Samuel Johnson:

The Adventurer, No. 138

It was on 15 November, 1990, in the gloom of winter, as I sat in the car with my wife, a tape of old Jugoslav folk music playing, that I beheld the town where I was born, much changed, and decided to begin the toils that would result in my creature, my book.

The story of my life – to me so individual, yet objectively so commonplace! Myself now subject to decay, I have witnessed the decay of countries, empires, and ideologies; to counter-balance which, I have enjoyed the growth of my own family and survived to see the continuation of my line…

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

BOOK ONE: Necessitations

Chapter 1: The Voyage

Chapter 2: The West Country

Chapter 3: The School

Chapter 4: The Old Business

Chapter 5: The Small Town

Chapter 6: The Parents

Chapter 7: The Exile

Chapter 8: The Decision

Chapter 9: The Refuge

Chapter 10: The Transcendence

Chapter 11: The Ghost

Chapter 12: The Enchanted Zone

Chapter 13: The Advance

Chapter 14: The Forgotten Army

Chapter 15: The Bomb

Chapter 16: The Renaissance

BOOK TWO: Permissibles

Chapter 17: The Funeral

Chapter 18: The Homeless

Chapter 19: The Jugs

Chapter 20: The Sixties

Chapter 21: The Writer

Chapter 22: The Future

Chapter 23: At Large and Leisure

Chapter 24: The Global Dance

Chapter 25: The Sicilian Yacht

Chapter 26: The Wilderness

BOOK THREE: Ascent

Chapter 27: The Fog

Chapter 28: The Secret Inscriptions

Chapter 29: The Two Suns

Chapter 30: The Hill

Chapter 31: The Years

Chapter 32: The Black Desert

Envoi

Picture Section

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

BOOK ONE

1
The Voyage

Our anchor has been plucked out of the sand and gravel of Old England. I shall have no connection with my native soil for three, or it may be four or five years. I own that even with the prospect of interesting and advantageous employment before me it is a solemn thought.

William Golding

Rites of Passage

‘Where the hell are they taking us?’ It was a good question.

No one could answer. The troop train wound its slow way northwards through England. The troops, crowded close in every compartment, set up a clatter as they divested themselves of their FSMOs (Field Service Marching Orders), their rifles, their steel helmets, their kitbags. Then silence fell. Some men read whatever was to hand. Some stared moodily out of the window. In the manner of troops everywhere, most men, when not being ordered about, slept. They had been up before the July dawn and parading by sunrise.

Nobody knew where they were going – ‘not even the driver,’ said one cynic. ‘The driver has sealed orders, regarding his destination, labelled NOT TO BE OPENED TILL ARRIVAL.’

The young soldiers, Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh, were dressed in drab khaki uniform. Although they had been trained not to feel – in the manner of soldiers through the ages – the high spirits of youth showed through: the wakeful ones smoked and joked. Nevertheless, knowledge that they were going abroad to fight induced a certain seriousness. When the round of jokes had died and the stubs of their Players and Woodbines had been stamped out, they seized on the opportunity to put their booted feet up. It would be a long journey.

Reveille had sounded in Britannia Barracks at four thirty. By the time it was light, platoons of newly trained soldiers were marching down to Norwich Thorpe Station. The ring of their steel-tipped boots echoed in empty streets. They piled into the waiting train, goaded on like cattle by their sergeants.

When the train pulled out of the station, wartime security ensured that it was for a rendezvous unknown. Also unknown to the men, impervious even to their imaginations, was how the operation in which they were involved was mirrored by another more sinister operation, taking place even then on the mainland of Europe. In the dawn light of many European cities, cattle trucks standing in railway sidings were being filled with Jews, men, women and children. Shrouded in secrecy, German cattle trains were pulling out towards destinations with names then unknown to the outside world, Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Sobibor.

Some time during that long English day, the troop train drew into Lime Street station in Liverpool. More troops were crammed aboard. The train continued its sluggish journey northwards, crossing into Scotland. Towards the end of the afternoon, it wound through the poor suburbs and peeling tenements of Glasgow, crawled at walking pace as if exhausted by its journey.

Here citizens turned out to wave and cheer and toss buns and ciggies to the troops. Improvised banners hung from slum windows, saying GOOD LUCK LADS and similar encouragements. Women waved Union Jacks. Bright of eye, the troops jostled at the train windows, waving back. No one on that train would ever forget those warm Scottish hearts.

At Greenock docks, security gates opened, to close behind the train. The train halted with a whistle of expiring steam. With a great bustle and kicking of everything in sight, the men about to leave Britain de-trained. Sergeants gave their traditional cries of ‘Get fell in!’ The troops stood in ranks, rifle on one shoulder, kitbag on the other, now isolated from civilian life.

An entire period of their lives had come to an end. A more challenging one was about to begin.

Towering above the parade, moored to the quayside in the quiet waters of the Clyde, was the troopship Otranto, 21,500 tons. Prior to the war, the Otranto had belonged to Canadian Pacific Steamships, when it was accustomed to making the journey between Vancouver and Hong Kong. Seagulls screamed about its funnels. Orders were shouted. Loaded down with kit, the men climbed the gangplank, forced by its steepness to cling to a worn wooden rail. One by one, they stepped into the open maw of the ship, to be dispersed among its many decks.

So alien was this experience to most men that some were immediately seasick, although the ship lay without motion at its moorings.

Among the thousands forced to climb that gangplank was a lad not then nineteen. He entered the threadbare floating world with some excitement, being at that period of life where everything is novel, and what is novel is welcome. He was in misapprehension about many things; but many of those things, such as his emotional nature, he was able to set to one side under the greater urgencies of war. With energy and resource, he set about finding himself the best possible position on his allotted mess deck, in the depths of the ship.

He also pursued a line of conduct developed long before at school, that of making light of circumstances by joking with his fellows.

When he left home at the end of his embarkation leave, this young man promised his mother, Dot, that he would write home regularly. This promise he kept over the next four years.

Owing to Dot’s dedication, the letter I wrote home after boarding the Otranto, complete with its inked illustration, was preserved. It shows me in ebullient mood.

Now as I write it’s nearly sunset, with the sun flaming over the waters. Although we have moved away from the port, we’re anchored in sight of land – our land … I’m writing on a raft on the Boat Deck and a chap with a ukelele is leading community singing. (They’re just singing ‘Lili Marlene’: ‘Orders came for sailing Somewhere over there …’)

I don’t actually know how I feel. It’s difficult to describe. Everything has a dreamlike quality, we don’t quite believe it … But I’m trying to record all I see, and store everything that happens in my imagination. It’s certainly going to be interesting!

A new life’s ahead but, boy oh boy, we’re ready for it. Please try and don’t worry. As yet I’m enjoying myself – and it’s broadening my mind …

Some phrases in the letter, such as ‘broadening the mind’, were family catch phrases, jokes.

Wartime security decreed that we should never reveal where we were. Troop movements could provide useful information to the enemy. In everything – as in family life – there was secrecy. And England was a kind of family in those years. A companion poster to the ones saying ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ admonished more gently: ‘Be Like Dad – Keep Mum’.

The Otranto had been christened The Empress of Canada at its launching in 1922. Came the war and its feminine name had been ripped from it. Refitting on a large scale had taken place. It had been painted a North Atlantic grey from stem to stern. Just as those climbing up its gangplank had suffered the severest haircut of their lives, so the old ship had been shorn of its luxury trimmings. Except, that is, in the officers’ quarters.

Under cover of dark, the troopship slipped away down the Clyde, past the Isle of Arran and the pendulous Mull of Kintyre, round the sleeping north coast of Northern Ireland, to where the shallows of the continental shelf gave way to deeper waters – still the haunt of Germany’s U-boats at that period.

Dawn came. Ships, naval and merchant, were gathering, and spent the day manoeuvering into formation. Towards sunset we began to move. The cold grey ships slid into the cold night. Possibly twenty-eight ships all told, forming the last of the big wartime convoys. The strong heartbeat of the Otranto’s engines was never to leave us over the weeks to come.

No smoking allowed on deck. The glow of a cigarette could be seen seven miles away.

Only the captain knew our destination. North America? The Middle East? Not, with luck, not India! India meant Burma. Our progress southwards consisted of a series of long zigzags, to west, to east: a manoeuvre against an enemy who still patrolled Atlantic waters. Yet by July 1944, the tides of war were turning in the Allies’ favour. No more was the Mediterranean Mussolini’s mare nostrum. Malta had survived more bombs than fell on London, Rommel had been defeated in North Africa. Our convoy was to be the first one not forced to sail by the longest route, travelling round the Cape of Good Hope, calling in at Durban for shore leave.

We sailed into the Mediterranean, through the narrow mouth guarded by the Rock of Gibraltar. Part of our destroyer escort left us, turning back into the prison-hued Atlantic. Suddenly, the sea was blue, sea birds cried, the great rock sang to port. Northern Europe had sunk below the horizon. My sails filled with excitement. The world looked wonderful, basking in balmy air. At sunset, a great warm breath was exhaled from the African coast, the very aroma of all that was exotic: perfume, camel dung, armpits of Oued-Nails, apricots, limes, other unknown fruits, frangipani, and the entrails of Arab towns.

Five thousand men were packed aboard the Otranto. On each deck, men, crowded like slaves on the Middle Passage, ate their food at mess tables, lived and slept there. So cramped were our quarters that half the men slept overhead in hammocks, while below them slept the other half, flat on the deck on palliasses.

The Otranto had five or possibly six decks above the water line: Sun Deck, Promenade Deck, Boat Deck, where the officers were quartered, A Deck, B Deck and C Deck. The detachment I was with was down on H Deck, the lowest deck in the ship, Damnation Deck, Doolally Deck, Dead Duck Deck, five decks below the water line, carved out of the very keel. To escape to the Boat Deck, the highest deck on which Other Ranks were allowed, entailed a long climb upward, through other crowded decks. Had a torpedo struck us, no one of H Deck would have stood a hope in hell of survival. We knew it.

But underlying the crowded discomfort of the ship, and the tedium of life aboard, went excitement at a first encounter with a hitherto inaccessible world, danger, and the quest for a drinkable mug of tea.

As soon as we were in warmer waters, I slept up on deck. It was permitted, yet few men took advantage of it. Over the rail lived the unceasing sea, heaving as if in the throes of giving birth, often phosphorescent with great sheets of wavering life, murmuring to itself in a green marine dream.

Our only enemies were the matelots. The sailors, hating soldiers, cleansed the decks at dawn every morning and hosed any sleepers with icy jets of sea water. We woke early to avoid them, both sides cursing the other. To return to H Deck was like trying to breathe stale sponge cake.

Of all the troops aboard ship, I seemed almost alone in enjoying the voyage. In the warrens of the ship, looped about with grey pipes of every bore, coiling along the bulkheads or snaking overhead, it was easy to imagine we were on a giant spaceship, heading for unknown planets. It was an enthralling fantasy.

So, in a sense, we were. We passed Malta and Pantelleria. Our first harbour was Port Said, at the head of the Suez Canal.

We passed slowly through the canal, pursued on either side by twin humps of wake. Heaving to in the Great Bitter Lake, we waited while a troopship passed us, heading north, homeward bound for England. Those aboard called mockingly across to us, ‘Get your knees brown!’ We moved at snail’s pace into the Red Sea and a zone of intense heat, where mirages trembled on either desolate bank.

Improvised shower cubicles spurted salt water while we assaulted our bodies with salt-water soap. Emergency urinals – little more than raised troughs – had been clamped on to the Boat Deck. To their notice, NOTHING TO BE THROWN DOWN THESE LATRINES, a wag had prefixed the words IT IS.

By this time, we knew there could be but one destination for us. Burma.

We disembarked on Bombay docks in September 1944. Looking back at the grey walls of the ship, I realised that it had become a kind of womb after thirty days afloat; in the end, we had grown so dependent upon it that we were reluctant to leave.

‘Bags of bull, lads!’

Ever obedient to the sergeant, our platoon got fell in and marched to Bombay’s Arabian Nights-cum-Keble-College railway station.

At the cavernous station we had an hour’s wait for our train. An hour to look, to stare, even to speak! The brightness of everything, the nervous energy of the stringy brown men, selling and begging. Here a thousand worlds seemed to be contained, with fascinations inexhaustible.

Our train slunk into its designated platform and we climbed aboard, humping our kit. A whistle blew. We had three hundred miles to go, to Mhow, in Central Provinces.

I described it in a letter home.

We travelled third class on the train. What coaches! – Wooden, ramshackle, a square box for a compartment, ten feet by ten feet, and the seats made for a race that slept on nails. No window glass, no spitting allowed. Eight bells sound, the natives scream, the train gives a compulsive jerk forward …

Night swooped down. We smeared anti-mosquito cream on hands and face, and rolled down our sleeves. The winged wildlife of the place soared in and cavorted round the light. From the darkness came hoarse croaks of bullfrogs and the high-speed Morse of crickets.

A considerable portion of the native population sleeps on the stations. They burn herbs which smell strange and musky – whether pleasant or foul you can’t quite decide.

We fell asleep uncomfortably, one way or another. When I awoke it was dawn and the sun, donning rouge and roses, climbed back to heaven. Allah be praised! We wiped the mozzy ointment off.

The train clattered through rocky ravines, tree-covered land, wide plains. Strange trees, tropical birds. Parrots and monkeys we saw in the wilder parts. Round the villages cluster padi fields, maize, and what-have-you. The beasts of burden are humpbacked cows, oxen, and sturdy black water buffalo, which wallow in mud holes when they get the chance.

The further we travelled into the interior, the greyer grew the rags and clothing of the people, and the fouler and more frequent became the beggars. We saw old vultures, hawks, and lizards a foot long. Goats roamed the stations. All these attractions palled as we became dirtier, hungrier, and more tired.

It poured with rain, steady beating rain, a reminder that the monsoon was not yet over. We put up the shutters. Night fell, and still it rained.

It rained when we reached Mhow station. Hauling our kit – kitbags, mosquito nets, blankets, big packs, respirators, rifles – we crossed the station to where lorries awaited us. We bumped over to the cantonment …

The rain stopped and the night smelt good. In the dim lighting our quarters seemed like a palace: paved floors, lofty ceilings, white paint. By morning light it looks more like a barn!

It’s all very fascinating. Tomorrow I hope to look over the village, which seems quite large. We shall spend a month here.

In short, everything’s fine, mighty fine.

The train journey to Mhow was the first of many journeys, since the train was such a feature of Indian travel at the time. However long, however arduous the journeys, the spectacle of India itself mitigated the tedium.

Mhow, the village, is best remembered in its picture-postcard aspect, when strident day suddenly marries velvet night and the flying foxes, waking in the tall acacias, take flight for distant fig trees. Summer lightning flickers all round, flirting with the horizon, nervy, noiseless. Then kerosene lamps on stalls lick their yellow tongues, making the bazaars enigmatic. Weird music crackles from radios, and a whole new mystery envelops the world.

In Mhow was a Signals training centre, designed to toughen us up after the voyage, in preparation for more arduous times in Burma. Oh, the wriggling and conniving, the malingering, which went on among men who wished to avoid action in Burma at all costs – including, presumably, a cost to their self-esteem. You see clever soldiers who have found a rock to cling to – barnacles with a job in the quartermaster’s stores or service as an orderly in the hospital. Others, perhaps, become base wallahs and box wallahs in New Delhi, to serve out a safe and boring war, until it is time to return home with a Long Service medal and nothing to report. Anything, rather than be involved with the shooting war further east. My own attitude was that the dice should be allowed to fall where they would. This time was an awakening for me, as no doubt for many others. Such personal matters were never discussed. But I had left behind, not only England, but an inadequate earlier self, as the times demanded.

Much in the Army was startling, not least the chorus of complaint that rose on every side about everything. Many older men had been wrenched from jobs or marriage. They resented a violent disruption to their lives; whereas for me the East was life, life at last.

For me, novelty overrode any discomfort. The pre-dawn runs, the petty restrictions, the training, the shouting, caused me little pain: I had survived ten years in boarding schools under rather worse conditions. For this at least the public-school system could take credit: it accustomed one to hardship and injustice.

The war for many provided a kind of release from personal problems. The question bothering humanity, or an intellectual fraction of it, at least since the days of the ancient Greeks, was summarised by H. G. Wells in the touching title of one of his books, What Are We to Do with Our Lives? This dilemma was resolved, or at least shelved, by hostilities. Family conundrums were of no moment when one was issued with a Sten gun.

It is this kind of effect that makes war so popular.

Japanese military operations had been widely successful in the Far East. Events unravelled rapidly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.

Hong Kong fell on Christmas Day. On 15 February 1942, the supposedly impregnable base of Singapore fell to a Japanese army. Thirty thousand Japanese confronted 85,000 British and Commonwealth troops. Shortly before the end, General Perceval, in command of the Singapore garrison, sent a message to Churchill in England: ‘Have 30,000 rounds of ammunition. What shall we do with it?’ Churchill cabled back: ‘How about firing it at the enemy?’ The suggestion was not carried out. Perceval surrendered, delivering the Commonwealth troops to a bitter imprisonment. A black day for the British Empire.

Two Japanese divisions had already advanced into Burma. Mandalay was taken in May of that year. Disaster and disillusion followed.

The Japanese became regarded as invincible, while their cruelty to the Chinese and other races who fell under their control was such that they were regarded almost as a sub-species of the human race. Their ability to live and fight in dense jungle caused the British to regard them as superhuman.

Clearly, the war in Europe was to be preferred as a theatre in which to fight. Death rates for prisoners captured by German and Italian armies amounted only to some four per cent, whereas under the Japanese the rate was twenty-seven per cent – higher still on the notorious Death Railway.

At this distance in time, it’s hard to recall the particular hells conjured up by the very name Burma. Our attitude towards the Japanese was compounded of a toxic mix of reality and racism.

In 1941 and 1942, Japanese advances in seven months were more spectacular than any of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkriegs. The wolves came down by boat, plane and bicycle. Their fleets crossed over 3,000 sea miles, their armies engulfed much of China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies, multitudes of Pacific islands, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma, advancing westwards until they stood at the very gates of India. They struck to the south, deeply enough to launch air raids on Darwin in northern Australia. They were a fever virus on the body of the East. Wherever they went, Japanese armies behaved with punishing ruthlessness.

These were the facts we chewed over in Mhow as we handed in respirators lugged all the way from Norwich. We drew jungle green battledress and handed in the absurd KD – khaki drill – and topis with which we had been issued in England. We exchanged gaiters for puttees. Puttees protected ankles and lower legs from venomous things which could be hiding in long grass.

Two Japanese divisions entered Burma in January of 1942. With them went the Burma National Army, led by a man who knew the ground, Aung San, a courageous Burmese destined to fight on both sides in the war, and to father an even more courageous daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi. These divisions captured Rangoon and advanced northwards on Mandalay, which fell in May. It was another in a long line of British disasters. The British and Indians retreated from Mandalay by car, cart and foot. Only one road led out of the trap. They had to travel westwards on the long trail leading to Dimapur, and the railway line to Calcutta.

British counter-offensives along the Burmese coast and in the Arakan, under horrific conditions, met with little success. They served merely to reinforce the picture of a fiendish enemy who could not be beaten. The Japanese would call from the jungle in the dark, like parrots from a thicket, ‘Hello, Johnny! Hello, Johnny! Who fuckee your missus?’ To fire blindly at the taunting voices was to give your position away.

The struggle for Burma, a country larger than France, is a record of disillusion and heroism on both sides. The main protagonists, Britain and Japan (and the USA, as far as it entered the picture) were far distant from the scene of action. This factor contributed enormously to local difficulties. It explains too why very few war photographers were present to place the struggle on visual record.

Disease – malaria, dysentery and various fevers – accounted for as many men as did Japanese bullets and bayonets. Supplying the British XIVth Army was a very low priority where Churchill was concerned. That army felt itself neglected and abandoned to rot in miserable circumstances. It called itself, in a mood of romantic despair, the ‘Forgotten Army’. The label has stuck, and not without reason.

It was the insignia of that army I stitched on to my jungle greens in Mhow, before our detachment was shipped towards the leafy fighting terrain in Burma.

Not for the first time, my life was about to begin anew. But change, uncertainty, had been a feature of life in the years leading up to the outbreak of war with Germany.

2
The West Country

Stop and think sometime about the roller coaster I’m on. Some day on Titan, it will be revealed to you just how ruthlessly I’ve been used, and by whom, and to what disgustingly paltry ends.

Kurt Vonnegut

The Sirens of Titan

Summer – time of innocence, time of wickedness.

In the summer of AD 1938, the Boxbaum family came to live next to the Aldiss family. They came in the night, time of secrets, husband and wife and two children. The houses in Bernard Road, Gorleston on Sea, were terraced. Short paths led straight from the gate, across the front gardens to the front door. My parents went out to greet the Boxbaums, who were exhausted and disoriented. Dot took them a standard English panacea, a pot of tea.

The Boxbaums, driven by Nazi tyranny, had arrived safely in England.

Frau Boxbaum was slight and raven-haired. She arrived in Gorleston speaking no English. The boy was about eight, tow-haired. His sister was probably ten or eleven, a pretty girl, dark-haired with eyes of Aegean blue. They were the first foreign children we had met. Playing with us, they mastered English very quickly; we were impressed, it had taken us years to learn the language.

Mother lent Frau Boxbaum cutlery and plates and various necessaries. The family had escaped with very few possessions. The behaviour of my parents – and of other people in the road – was exemplary. Carpets, rugs, an armchair, curtains, other necessities, arrived at Frau Boxbaum’s door. Bill, if not anti-Semitic, had talked freely of ‘Jew boys’, subscribing to the mild (mild?) British anti-Semitism of the time. That was all put away for this special case. The curtain had been lifted on what was happening in Germany.

Frau Boxbaum had brought some photograph albums with her. We looked at pictures of smiling family groups as she turned the pages, trying out her few words of English. Her foreignness held the scent of a wider social sphere than ours, comfortable and yet doomed. These vistas excited Betty and me, already impatient with a knowledge of our provincialism. Other horizons, other costumes, other rooms.

They had lived well, in a large mansion somewhere outside Hamburg. Flowers on side-tables, salon paintings on walls. Plenty of servants, extensive grounds, cream-coloured automobiles with chauffeurs, family picnics in the countryside.

Not unlike the Boxbaums, our family too had come down in the world, from prosperity in East Dereham to a cramped little terraced house called Number Eleven. We felt ashamed for the Boxbaums, descended from luxury to a little hutch in Bernard Road.

Herr Boxbaum was an elegant man who spoke faultless English. Once he had seen his family settled safely in England, out of Himmler’s clutches, he determined to return to Germany, to salve some of their worldly goods ‘before things got too bad’. He kissed his wife and children goodbye and sailed for Hamburg.

His wife waited for him to return. He never did. The Gestapo caught him. I assume he died in a concentration camp.

The failure of Herr Boxbaum to return from Germany was a watershed, not only for his unfortunate little family. Bill no longer said there would be a war if Winston Churchill did not stop annoying Hitler; instead he warned us that war was coming. And for that event he made sensible preparations.

In that hot summer of 1938, I walked into town and back to buy my favourite magazine, Modern Boy. Nobody was about. The streets were deserted. The air was heavy, windows were open. Every radio in every house was tuned to the Test Match. It was England’s innings. Len Hutton was notching up remarkable scores against Australia.

Modern Boy had rearmament stamps to collect, battleships, tanks, heavy guns. I was excited; Mother said, ‘That’s nothing to look forward to.’ Neville Chamberlain was preparing to fly to Munich to discuss the fate of Czechoslovakia. In the house next to us, on the other side to the Boxbaums, Mrs Newton – devoted to her afternoon bottle of gin – threw open her bedroom window and screamed, ‘Help! Help! The Spaniards are coming!’

A correct statement in essence. Only the nationality was mistaken.

Perhaps in every childhood there comes a defining moment when, by some trick of behaviour, one is made aware for the first time of one’s own character, and that one has a personal idiolect of beliefs. And possibly that moment of insight – which remains always in memory – is a herald of one’s adult nature.

As a small boy of three or four, I was taken by my parents to a tall narrow stone house in Wisbech, on the Wash. There, among a muddle of armchairs, lived a number of distant cousins on my mother’s side of the family.

Permitted to run out into the garden, I saw among a clump of irises the perfect webs of the chubby-backed garden spider (araneus diadematus). I had admired this pretty spider, and its industry, in my grandmother’s garden in Peterborough. The intricate construction of the web was a task I had watched with respectful attention.

A passing butterfly, a cabbage white, flew into one of the webs. As its struggles began, a small girl in a white frock rushed from the house. Seeing the plight of the butterfly, she screamed at me to save it from the nasty spider.

Although I was keen to please the girl, I could not but see the matter from the spider’s point of view; in hesitating, I allowed her to rush out from her corner and seize upon the butterfly. The girl was distressed, and ran back into the house in tears, saying how horrid I was. Well, I too felt it was gruesome; but the butterfly’s agonies were brief and the spider had as much right to live as anyone.

Heaving themselves up from their armchairs, emerging from the house, angry distant cousins gained proximity. I was seriously scolded and ushered indoors – unfit to stay in their nice garden.

Upset though I was – and feeling a degree of guilt – I knew the grown-ups were wrong. The sundry shortcomings of nature, like the way in which we all ate each other or perished, were givens with which one had to live. In the circumstances, observation made more sense than interference. Unfortunately, this has become rather a lifetime principle.

Dot and I watched Bill as he rubbed black Cherry Blossom boot polish into his sideburns, which grey had already invaded. Preparing a lie about his age, he walked down to the recruiting office in Gorleston and volunteered for the RAF. He could still fly. He was lean and fit, forty-eight pretending to be forty-two. The recruiting officer turned him down. Bill was a brave man, and was shaken by this rejection.

His thoughts then turned to our safety. We could see the North Sea from our attic window. When war came, we would be shelled or bombed – or, of course, invaded. Bill decided therefore that we should move to the other end of the country.

In the school holidays of summer 1939, Betty and I walked barefoot from the house down to the beaches and promenades, to spend our whole sunny day there as usual, on the sand, in the sea, chatting to shopkeepers, sailing a clockwork speedboat in the yacht pool, or watching the Punch and Judy show (every scene of which we had by heart).

The front at Gorleston provided a spectacle of which we never tired. It was safe and peaceful. Somewhere across the sea, the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and the more firmly entrenched regime of Stalin’s Soviet Union were busy at their gruesome tasks of enslaving and killing whole populations.

But the British Empire was safe, the colour bar securely in place in its colonies. Tea was still served at four, while the Yankee dollar was worth only two half-crowns.

Betty and I were happy in Gorleston. When I fell ill and was confined to bed, I wrote and illustrated a long verse drama set in Victorian times. The story moved freely from a stage play into real life and back. Where I got the idea from I do not know; now it is a commonplace of deconstructionists – a word unknown in the thirties. It was my first sustained piece of writing. Its subject was the question of appearances: something was happening but – wait! – it was merely being acted!

From the local Woolworth – then still ‘The 3d and 6d Stores’ – Betty and I bought issues of McGlennan’s Song Book. In triple columns, it published the words of the latest popular songs. Betty and I sat in bed together, singing songs made famous by Hutch, Dorothy Carless, Gracie Fields and others: if not melodiously, enthusiastically.

Being mere children, Betty and I were not privy to Bill’s plans. One day, we were hauled in from the beach and told we were going on holiday to the West Country, to Devon.

The Bernard Road house was closed up, our beloved cat Tiny was left in a neighbour’s care. We then undertook a trek across the south of England, arriving eventually at Witheridge, in the middle of Devon. Norfolk born and bred, we were impressed by, or perhaps a little contemptuous of, the hills and valleys; we had grown to prefer a flat world. In Witheridge we stayed on Thorn’s farm, where the young farmer’s wife fed us enormous breakfasts and evening meals. My fourteenth birthday occurred on the farm; my parents gave me a watch.

The sights, sounds and smells of the farm absorbed all our attention. In Witheridge, they had never heard of Hitler. Bill had his gun, went out shooting rabbits, was a countryman again, trying to forget his recent disasters in East Dereham.

The time of childhood was not entirely over. Whatever my new watch said, hours and days were still dawdling by. On the farm we had for company other creatures who did not live in the brisk adult time flow: the calves, young sheep, kittens and the Thorns’ two dogs. We measured out our days in Wellington boots. It was a timeless time – less than a month away from the declaration of war.

We left the farm and drove to a place called Pinhoe, on the outskirts of Exeter, where Father bought a caravan. We had to live in it for two days on the sales area by a busy road until Bill’s cheque was cleared by the local bank.

Towing the caravan, we drove to Cornwall, sleeping overnight – sensation – in a farmer’s field. Next day, we arrived at Widemouth Bay, to the west of Bude. Betty and I had yet to realise that that caravan was actually our home.

Widemouth was a beautiful wild place, not far from Tintagel, legendary home of King Arthur. Sheep had grazed the grass short to the very edge of the cliffs. Contained in the bowl of pasture was a small whitewashed cottage which served as the only shop for miles; it sold milk, bread, and – more importantly as far as Betty and I were concerned – Lyons’ fruit pies, 4d. Just beyond the shop was a sheer drop of cliff to the rocks below, all vastly different from the tame seasides of the Norfolk coast. We climbed the rocks, ventured into deep pools, caught small fish, watched the waters of the Atlantic wallop into barnacled fissures in the cliff face. Whatever I did, my small sister followed faithfully.

Close by the whitewashed cottage, one other caravan stood. From our caravan window we enjoyed a panorama of the Atlantic. How quiet was the Atlantic in those brassy August days! And I ventured at last to pluck up courage and ask Bill, ‘Will I go back to Framlingham?’

He answered casually, as if everything had long been settled in his mind. ‘We’ll find you a school near here.’

Oh, the joy of it! The relief!

War had presented me with an escape from a fate I feared more than anything else. I firmly believed that Framlingham College spelt spiritual death for me. Every day of my three years there was spent in dread.

To give an instance of the teaching, which was Gradgrindian in temperament: our French lessons were devoted to learning irregular verbs, we were not taught to speak French, or to enjoy the beauties of French literature; long lists of irregular verbs offered better opportunity for chastisement. Days were spent moving from classroom to classroom, carting books about, learning how to escape punishment.

Hardly surprisingly, by reflex we punished each other. Carrying those books about, we always put our Bibles on top of the pile. One boy allowed a Latin textbook to lie on top of his Bible. We beat him up.

And the foul hours of night. Arriving within those walls at the age of eleven, I was unaware of sex, except as a sort of game we had innocently played. Sex had been unknown at St Peter’s Court, my preparatory school. That first week in the junior dormitory at Framlingham, the head boy of the dormitory crept into my bed. I was overwhelmed with disgust and shame at his advances, and I feebly pushed him away.

From then on, this sneering bully was always about, always leering at me. Salt in the wound was that his first name was the same as mine. I hated his stupid face, his staring eyes, his winks and jeers, and would have killed him if I could. But he was twice my weight.

That first loathing of homosexual acts remained with me. Rather worse, it left me with a distaste for the flesh for some years.

Perhaps my story-telling in that dorm, at which I became so successful, protected me from further insults of the kind.

So Betty and I played light-heartedly in the rock pools, while time and tide dawdled. It did not bother us that we knew no one else in the world. The sun dazzled on the water, the little crabs scuttled at the bottom of our rubber buckets. We cared as greatly for the events in Europe – the Panzers, the sabres, the fruitless cavalry charges, the Stukas – as did the crabs.

Noon on 3 September. The summer had crumbled away, along with peace. Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany, only twenty-one years after the last war had run its course. Dot was preparing lunch in our new caravan. Bill and I stood with our neighbour, outside his caravan, where his large wife was frying up. Neville Chamberlain’s voice mingled with the gurgle of sausages wallowing in their fat.

I see it all as if it were a photograph. The world has faded to sepia, along with much else. I described the scene in my novel Forgotten Life. Fiction is often the best medium for such drama, when momentous and meagre clash.

At that solemn time, with Britain plunging ill prepared into war, I went about in a state of sin, secretly rejoicing, I don’t have to go back to bloody Framlingham! May all those bastards there rot! Thank you, God, thank you, Hitler!

That night, we blacked out the tiny square window in the caravan roof, some with fury, others with shrieks of laughter which served to ripen the adult anger.

We woke on the 4th and went running out across the green while breakfast was prepared. There was the wonderful view, the sea, the cliffs, the white cottage. Sheep grazed by the wheels of our car. Wartime!

We were to all intents and purposes homeless. Bill drove into Bude, to return with a key. A bungalow stood empty on the cliffs just above Widemouth. We went to look it over with a builder. Bill was agreeing to rent it by the month, Dot was chirping with pleasure.

Betty danced in the empty rooms. Bill shouted, ‘Come here! Behave!’ Sunlight poured through the front windows. The bungalow was unfurnished, as neat as new, and bereft of everything except a copy of Fantasy, lying alone on a window seat.

On the cover of that 1939 issue, Fantasy: A Magazine of Thrilling Science Fiction, was an imaginative painting of fire engines drawn up in the centre of London, in Piccadilly, fighting off giant caterpillars with jets of plaster of Paris. In a year’s time, the brigades would be dealing with another kind of invasion from the sky.

We moved into the bungalow behind Widemouth cliffs. A few sticks of furniture were bought in Bude. Autumn held its breath: days remained calm and brassy. Looking out of the window at the Atlantic as the sun went down, Bill would say over the frugal supper table, ‘It’s been a lovely day.’ His aggrieved tone comes back to me. ‘It’s been a lovely day.’ On the horizon, black against the sinking sun, our first convoys – those convoys in which I would one day find myself – were setting out for foreign waters. The weather remained too calm for war to be real.

As that ominous season advanced towards winter, the bungalow crouching near the cliffs became more isolated. Over Bill fell a mood of hopelessness. The whitewashed store on the bay closed its shutters. Cars ceased to run along the coast road. Betty and I wandered about the strange wild place, among the gorse, imitating the shrieks of the seagulls overhead, much as Wordsworth’s boy ‘blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him’.

The wet Cornish season closed in. Rain pelted down, rushing to get to the centre of the earth. And when the rain abated, the Atlantic became angry, dashing with such force against the rock below the cliffs that spindrift cracked smartly against our window panes, gust after gust.

Before I was installed in a second public school, Bill and I made what I regarded as an epic journey. Setting out at four in the morning in our Rover, he and I, we drove all the way to Gorleston. It was dark when we started out from Widemouth. Roads had no cats’ eyes in those days. Our headlights were dimmed to meet blackout regulations. We arrived at the house in Bernard Road at about midday.

The Boxbaums had gone from next door. Their house, like others in the road, was closed up. A forsaken dog wandered loose in the street; Dennis Wheatley’s alarming novel Black August came to mind, like a vision of the near-future fulfilled. I still wonder what happened to the Boxbaums, in particular to that girl with the blue Aegean eyes. No doubt the Jewish community took care of them.

Bill packed everything into crates, in preparation for a removal firm to come and the house to be sold up for next to nothing. Nobody wanted to live on the east coast now. I helped him – or perhaps hindered, because he told me to take a walk and look at the sea. I made my way down to the front, where Betty and I had spent our most halcyon days.

In the few weeks of our absence a great change had overcome the town. The bandstand was locked, ‘for the duration’, as the saying went. Everything looked forlorn, with a more-than-mid-winter desertion about it. The lovely stretches of sand were empty. The shops we knew were almost all shut down; some had boarded up their windows with improvised shutters. Barbed wire was being unrolled along the promenade.

Bill and I started back to Cornwall before nightfall with Dot’s canary in its cage on the back seat. The canary sang all the way home. Retrieved from the neighbour, Tiny also accompanied us.

Two events on the journey remain in mind, my tongue-tied awe at being alone with my father at close quarters, and our stop for a cup of tea and cake in Oxford – my first sight of that venerable city. I was excited, and not only at the prospect of tea. The waitresses in the St Giles Café were so slow in coming to serve us that Bill, never a patient man, walked out after a minute or two. I perforce followed.

That was the last I saw of Oxford for ten years.

When I was sent to my new school on the fringes of Exmoor, Bill set about finding work. His nest egg from Dereham looked less generous now. He and Dot drove a long way in search of a viable property. He had always been good at property deals, but the war made values uncertain. A newsagent’s shop in Chard, Somerset attracted him. There was something in Wincanton. Mother liked the idea of a tearoom. Or perhaps a shop in Exeter?

Exeter had many beautiful old features. Some narrow streets were medieval, resembling the Shambles in York. A particularly interesting book shop stood beside the cathedral. Life continued there as normal; how else? Except that some public buildings were fortified by walls of sandbags.

At first, I hated West Buckland. The grounds on which the school stands were donated by a local landowner, the Second Earl Fortescue, in the 1850s. The Fortescue family still live near by and maintain their friendly connection with the school. WBS consists of a series of stone buildings, not unlike a prison in appearance (in the manner of most public schools), well suited to the rather bare landscape in which it was planted. The quads were of an amazing draughtiness, as the wind howled in from the Atlantic, past Morte Point, bouncing over Fullabrook and Whitefield Downs, clowning its way across the Seven Sisters, to arrive in time for morning parade outside the headmaster’s offices.

WBS was heroically uncomfortable. In those early months of the war, everything in the country was in confusion. The school shared in that confusion. Compelled to take on extra boys, many of them evacuated from London, it scarcely knew how to house them. I found myself deposited in an emergency form room with an emergency name, Lower IV A. The room, with its raked desks, had been a chemistry lecture room. The desks were open; nothing could be stowed away in them. Nor were there such luxuries as common rooms. After class, you stayed in the classroom. There was no privacy. The blackout added to the gloom. All around, the winds and rains of Exmoor prowled and hammered at the buildings.

I was completely uprooted. The distance between East Dereham and West Buckland was too great.

I wrote to Bill to say that I wished to be taken away. Answer came from my mother that I would have to stick things out. There was nowhere else to go. My sister, meanwhile, had been sent to a school in Bideford. That did not suit her. She also begged to be rescued. Probably she begged more vehemently than I. She was rescued.

But things sorted themselves out. I was also in the throes of puberty – a rather delayed puberty, it seemed. In the baths after rugger, hulking great dayboys sported clumps of pubic bush, sticking out dismally like Norwegian beards.

A few bubbles foamed from my pipeline, then, at last, the real thing, that phlegm-like substance which makes babies. Puberty is a time of anxiety for boys: will they ever, preferably next week, possess massive dongs like the dayboys, together with thickets of hair like the furze on Hardy’s Egdon Heath? Then, low and behold, the miracle happens! There it is, the new weapon, in the pink, sniffing inquisitively at the randy world … And many kinds of interesting childish thought are doomed: instead you start wondering how you can get hold of a girl, get a hand down her blouse and up her skirt – particularly up her skirt – and feel her all over, to check on the legends you are hearing from all sides.

It must have been about that time I recited, ‘Hush, hush, whisper who dares. Christopher Robin is counting his hairs.’

So there it was. Constant erections to set against the draughty dormitories, the meagre meals, the parades, the clanging of the school bell. Ask not for what the bell tolls: it tolls for your erection.

I grew to love West Buckland. Perhaps it was in my second term, the term when, even on bleak Exmoor, winter yields to spring. The lanes round about East and West Buckland burst forth in primroses, primroses trailing as far as Shallowford, about which Henry Williamson wrote, the hedges fill with birds’ nests, and the nests with eggs. Soon, rugger will give way to cricket.

At Framlingham, we were incarcerated within the grounds, as in a high-security prison. At Buckland, we could get exeats which allowed us to wander the countryside on Sundays. You dressed in your rugger kit, collected some rough-and-ready sandwiches from the kitchens, and off you went in twos or threes. Wild Exmoor! How free it seemed, how strange! Once, Bowler and I saw a stag up on the hills. Shallow streams, ideal for damming, meandered about. And there were pits, corries more correctly, full of pure spring water, paved with pebbles six feet down. We actually took dips in them. They were freezing. We splashed and shouted in agony. Coming out, we pulled on shirt and shorts and ran about howling to restore circulation, yelling and laughing at our own madness.

Beatings at WBS were euphemistically known as ‘dabbing’. The custom was to make no sound while the beating was in progress.

I grew to relish the Spartan aspect of WBS and the grittiness of playing rugger in the teeming rain. But wartime WBS lacked the contrasts needed to fill the bleak hours after prep: magnificent productions of opera and plays, films with talks by travellers, scientific demonstrations to excite intellectual curiosity, rich things. Our form was not alone in enjoying education, in seeking to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is to civilisation what DNA is to inheritance.

The nurture side of school life needed improvement; shutting boys up in teenage monasteries was not the answer. WBS went coeducational some years ago, under Michael Downward, an enlightened headmaster. As one token of his enlightenment, Michael recently made me Vice-president of the school.

Bill settled on a property near Barnstaple, a corner shop up for sale. I felt sadness for my father, and disgrace for myself. What a comedown from H. H. Aldiss’s shop in Dereham! The Barnstaple shop was a small general store. It sold groceries, cigarettes and newspapers, and housed a sub-post office in one corner.

Bill applied himself to this new trade with dedication. He opened the shop out, incorporating a small storeroom into the design. When rationing began, a coupon had to be exacted for every tin of baked beans, every quarter-pound of sugar. All coupons had to be cut from ration books. Accounting had to be done every weekend. Dot ran the post office. Both of them worked day and night, with no time for their children. We lived in tiny rooms behind and over the shop.

The straggling village of Bickington proved friendly. The post office counter gave Mother an ideal conversation post. Her character changed; she became open and genial. The fears and suspicions of Dereham were things of the past. In no time, she was elected Chairman of the local Women’s Institute, and was a popular success. The tradesmen ate out of her hand. Throughout the war, we never lacked for food. Sometimes fresh salmon, poached from a local river, was on the menu.

Cockney evacuees came down from London. The Women’s Institute proved equal to the task, and welcomed them with a reception – tea and music. Among the evacuees was a splendid strapping blond woman, a Mrs McKechnie – plainly a whore, loud and rude, but that traditional thing, a whore with a heart of gold – with whom Dot became friendly.

When the first wartime Christmas came round, I asked Bill if we were going to go to church, as previously we had always done in East Dereham.

He regarded me almost with scorn. ‘No,’ he explained.

It was impossible to make new friends in school holidays. One was there for so short a time. Penny North and I had a pale affection for each other. Betty and I played together, two strange children who got in the way of Bill’s shop activities. We dressed up and made stinks with my chemistry set, yet never managed quite to blow anything up. When she was ill, I made her a book of stories and drawings, The Stock-Pot Book.

One advantage of the cramped house was that you could climb out of my bedroom window on to a narrow ledge, then to another ledge, and from that get down to the ground. At night, I could escape by that route and walk about the blacked-out village.

More interestingly, I could climb out of a rear window, work my way across a rooftop, and get to a skylight in the roof of a defunct bakery. Levering with a screwdriver, I managed to break the catch of the skylight, and so swarm through into the deserted rooms below.

Here I often stood, wondering, wondering. A certain dark-haired evacuee girl had caught my attention. I talked to her over the back wall and offered to show her my precious secret hideaway, but she would not take the bait, or show me her precious secret hideaway.

The bakery was rat-infested. The rats could get through into Bill’s store by the side of the shop and run along a beam at the far end. This store, freezing in winter, had a corrugated-iron roof. Bill developed a hobby. He would stand with his .22 in the kitchen doorway at one end of the store and shoot rats down at the other end, as they ran along the beam, like clay pipes in a shooting gallery at a fair.

Bill had retained his rifles through all our removals. As France fell in 1940, Italy, the Fascist Italy of Mussolini, entered the war against us. Everyone expected that Hitler’s next move would be to invade England. Bill handed me one of his guns.

‘We may have to defend the street. You never know,’ he said. ‘Keep it clean.’

The gun was mine. Later, I almost killed my father with it.

At school, we all joined the OTC, the Officers Training Corps, and wore uniform. I became a good shot. When we weren’t playing rugger or running round the countryside, we went on military exercises through the local farms. The romps were enjoyable, even in pouring rain, when we wore stiff gas capes. One learnt useful things in the OTC, how to read a compass, how to read a map, how to sneak into an out-of-bounds pub for a pint of cider.

The war was going depressingly badly. After the fall of France, Britain stood alone against the horrible black machine devouring the continent. Bill built an air-raid shelter outside the back door. Dot bought a wind-up gramophone to cheer us up when air raids were in progress.

Once, when a raid was on, we trooped down to the shelter and sat there for an hour or two by candlelight. The shelter proved to be rather damp. After that, Bill used the place as a bacon store, while Betty and I took over the gramophone, on which to play, among other favourites, ‘The Ferryboat Serenade’, ‘Elmer’s Tune’, ‘Green Eyes’, ‘The Hut-Sut Song’ and ‘The Memory of a Rose’.

We lay awake at nights, listening to Dornier engines, like an ischaemic event in the lower cerebellum, as Goering’s Luftwaffe flew overhead. The Dorniers came in squadrons, passing very slowly, throb-throb-throb … The distinctive noise rolled down our chimneys. Listening, you felt as an animal feels, hiding when hunters are near.

One night at midnight, Bill roused me from my bed and we walked up the village to climb Belmont Hill, from whence there was a good view of the surrounding country.

A glow lit the whole sky to the south.

‘Exeter’s getting it,’ Bill said.

Later, we drove to Exeter to witness the extent of the damage. Most of the city had gone. Rubble had been cleared away by then. Nothing remained. Nothing, except the cathedral, which stood alone on an unearthly flat plain. Here and there, as we drove, we passed an occasional lamp standard which remained upright. No living person was to be seen; those unburied had decamped to adjoining villages. The Germans had wiped the city off the map. In this surreal landscape, Air Marshal Hermann Goering had done Salvador Dali’s work.

The English, so tolerant, so enduring, so brave, during World War II, became a lesser race after the war. Exeter was rebuilt as an anonymous town, without that sense of style its old black-and-white buildings had conveyed. Little memory was retained of what it had once been. The Germans, Poles, French rebuilt their cities according to old plans and photographs, effecting smart restorations and canny improvements. British town planners held no such reverence for what had been, as they plugged the standard chain stores into the city centres. The English made no great protest at what was happening.

The blackout lent an enchantment to banal village streets. On more than one occasion, we climbed Belmont Hill to watch the Luftwaffe at their work of destruction.

Far distant, as if an angry planet were about to rise, a fan-shaped light would grow on the horizon. We stood silent on the hill to witness the raid on Plymouth. Even the burning of distant Swansea was visible. Hundreds of civilians died, and with them fabrics and traditions of an earlier age.

After witnessing the air raids we would walk back down the hill, and huddle in the little kitchen behind the shop while Dot made us cups of tea. By the time we were in bed, we would hear the Dorniers returning to Germany. Throb-throb-throb, down the chimney again.

On Belmont Hill stood a small public school, run by a regimental sergeant-major posing as headmaster. The dramatist John Osborne, four years my junior, was incarcerated there as a boy. He used frequently to come down to our shop to buy a packet of Player’s ‘Weights’, whereupon he became friendly with Dot. Growing sick of the sergeant-major, Osborne dotted him a punch in the eye, for which he was expelled.

One great advantage of the blackout was the darkness everywhere, allowing the stars and Milky Way to shine clearly. With my little Stars at a Glance in hand, I used to stand on top of our air-raid shelter and watch the constellations. How peaceful were those regions of fire – so different from Exeter burning. Surely in the marvellous beauty of the night sky lay some hope for humanity, war or no war.

Since then, I have stood in the Dandenong Hills in Australia and looked up at a different sky. All the familiar populations of the northern hemisphere have gone. It is as if one stood on a different planet. Even the night sky seen from Mars would appear less alien: the Plough, Cassiopeia, and other constellations would look much the same from Olympus Mons as seen from our air-raid shelter. The distance between Earth and Mars is so short, if insuperable as yet.

At West Buckland, things settled down. The headmaster, Sammy Howells, was a master of sarcasm. He wore pince-nez and had a ginger moustache. The lapels of his suit were permanently discoloured by a W. D. & H. O. Wills’ product, Gold Flake cigarettes. Ciggies must have served him as dummy and mistress, and fumigated the perpetual pong of small boys from his nostrils.

To give the devil his due, he ran a tight ship in stormy times. Sammy was a brilliant teacher of English and in particular of English grammar. With his withering tongue, practised at dissecting the language, he could take any unfortunate boy apart. I relished those lessons, much as I feared Sammy. He took a particular dislike to me, calling me ‘The Comedian’. Sammy liked to be the one making the jokes.

It was noticeable that when he picked on one boy in the class, everyone else laughed fawningly, protecting themselves from the line of fire. They also professed to like him, for the same reason. I really hated Sammy. The old bastard died just before my first book was published. The smokes got him in the end. His lungs went. Poor Sammy Howells – a good headmaster, a brilliant teacher, a dedicated man, a shit.

One thing stands for ever to Sammy Howells’ credit. Whenever Winston Churchill was due to address the nation, Sammy had us all assemble in the Memorial Hall to listen to his speech. Listen we did to that great master of oratory, during those testing years the inspiration of our country.

Obtaining masters to teach was a wartime problem. Most of them had been called up into the Forces. Sammy engaged two conscientious objectors. One was a mathematics teacher, a Mr Coupland, immediately nicknamed, with cruel perception, Chicken Coupland. Coupland knew much maths but could not convey it. Despite furious beatings, liberally dispersed, he could not make us learn. I regret it; I never entered the world of maths, on which most sciences depend.

Mr Foster was a strange man, a refugee from somewhere. We tended to make fun of him. He was known as Mitabout Foreskin, a Bowler christening. Then he took us for a German lesson, and sang ‘Roselein’ to us in a beautiful tenor voice. From then on we were much more respectful.

‘Crasher’ Fay taught us German and English in the upper forms. Most lessons were enjoyable. It was the boredom after class, the lack of privacy, the noise that got to you. All well exemplified in Lindsay Anderson’s film of public school life, If …

The truth was that the hardships of wartime Buckland, together with the rigours of the climate – over eighty inches of rain a year, compared with East Dereham’s twenty-eight – formed a common bond between masters and staff. Once a term, a barber and his assistant would drive out from Barnstaple on rationed petrol and cut the hair of every boy in the school, working steadily all day, class by class. We went in to the torture chamber maned like lions, to emerge as criminals, scarred here and there by the hasty razor. Of course we laughed, unaware that similar shavings were taking place in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Some masters, some boys could not stand the rugged conditions. A brief visitant among the masters was an eccentric S. P. B. Mais, then quite a famous name, a popular broadcaster and writer. I knew his name from the pages of Modern Boy, for which he wrote spy stories. He walked about the school complaining, swaddled in sweaters, swathed in scarves. He taught maths in English lessons, algebra in geography, and anything in anything else. I was to meet him later in life. He left Buckland after one or two terms to write a grouchy little book about the place – a book banned by Sammy but adored by Sammy’s prisoners.

Certainly the place was remarkably cold and wet. Spartan was its ethos. After lights out in our house dormitory, the blacked-out windows had to be opened, the ones to the north, the ones to the south. Mid-ocean gales blew through the rafters, wafting Atlantic chill with them. Plumbing was rudimentary. Each of us had an enamel bowl, filled overnight with cold water. Many a winter’s morning we broke the ice before we could wash. I’m convinced this hardship was good for us, at least for those who survived.

Then came summer. We did not at that time appreciate the beauty of North Devon. But there were long evenings spent out on the playing fields, rehearsing cricket strokes, feeling both the sound and the motion of bat striking ball; or simply playing catch with friends, the leather pill flying high in the air as the shadows of the trees along the drive lengthened. We could also swim in the school pool, but the rule of nudity was never to my taste, concerned as I was with privacy and secrecy.

Once my parents had enlisted me in Buckland, they never visited the school again, although it was only eleven miles from the shop. At the end of term I might cadge a lift in a van to Barnstaple or else walk with others three miles down the valley to Filleigh station, there to catch a Barnstaple train. (Filleigh station has long since been closed.) From Barnstaple, one caught a bus up Sticklepath Hill to Bickington, where it stopped almost opposite our shop.

On one occasion, I returned from school, went upstairs, flung myself on an ottoman, and lay there reading in peace. The relief after the racket of school was considerable. Dot came upstairs from the shop, annoyed because I was so unsociable. I used to stay awake at nights, reading into the small hours.

Having exhausted all the astronomy books in the school library, I turned more eagerly to science fiction magazines, which in those days regarded astronomy as the queen of the sciences. In the fifties they were to become propagandists for space travel. Curious to think that today much SF finds its place less among the stars than inside computers, in games and thought-sequences that recycle old ideas in new form. Not, in fact, outward but inward.

SF magazines introduced me to the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. I went to the Barnstaple Atheneum and applied for membership. The old men were curious to find a fifteen-year-old in their midst. Sitting in a large leather chair, I read Thus Spake Zarathustra. There I came across that conception of the Übermensch which was enjoying such popularity across the Channel in Berlin.

Nietzsche’s ideas filled me with indifference, even when I encountered them, diversified, diluted, in the writings of such SF authors as Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, whose books enjoyed wide popularity. I marked myself down as the eternal underdog. This canine trail led upwards later, from underdog to Steppenwolf.

As for the Übermensch, they were part of the fantasies with which I, like many others, scared myself. To relieve the tedium of the bus ride from Bickington to Barnstaple, I would play the British spy travelling on a German bus. The innocent conductor, working his way along the aisle to sell us tickets, was the Gestapo Überleutnant, checking papers and passports. He would find me out. I would be captured and shot, and my body flung into the Rhine.

This drama so took hold of me that on one occasion I jumped from a moving bus as it crossed the Taw bridge, to go sprawling in the road. The conductor watched grinning from the back of his bus, but luckily did not fire at me.

At the Atheneum I became acquainted with the writings of a local Barnstaple author, W. N. P. Barbellion, author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man. The misanthropic Journal was more to my taste than Zarathustra. Barbellion is splendid on himself and on the War – even if in his case it was the Great War. He writes, ‘They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre hundred years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in AD 1915 – surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boche to play with – just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch?’

How could Barbellion foresee that within about twenty-five years after he wrote, the Boche were indeed intent on experimenting with the globe – and making a hell of it (aided and abetted by their allies the Japanese)? Did I but know it in AD 1942, they had already put the clock back by many centuries.

As for Barbellion on himself – to read him was to see myself in his sickly mirror.

‘I am so steeped in myself – in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshall and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know – if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with – but the rest of the diagnosis?

‘One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred.’

The adventures of Barbellion’s psyche led me to that epicentre of adolescent turbulence, The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff. I came across the book in two tall volumes, translated by Mathilde Blind – a name in its way as exciting as Bashkirtseff. This Ukrainian-Russian girl died aged twenty-five, thus becoming even more romantic than Barbellion, who ran to thirty-one years. The tempestuous Marie loved herself, hated herself. Misery excited her: it was something to pour into her many diaries. And she discovered as others have done that she was really two people.

‘At present I am vexed, as if for another person.

‘Indeed, the woman who is writing, and her whom I describe, are really two persons. What are all her troubles to me? I tabulate, analyse, and copy the daily life of my person; but to me, to myself, all that is very indifferent. It is my pride, my self-love, my interests, my envelope, my eyes, which suffer, or weep, or rejoice; but I, myself, am there only to watch, to write, to relate, and to reason calmly about these great miseries, just as Gulliver must have looked at the Liliputians …’ (Paris, May 30th 1877.)

Copying out these sentences now, I recall that for a brief period I lusted for this amazing emotional girl, long dead. I heard her satin skirts sweeping the Second Empire carpets, her voice at the piano, I empathised with her intense longings, feeling we would be a perfect match for one another, a consummation and a disaster waiting to happen.

Of course I was ashamed of these feelings. In this callow, shallow period, I was ashamed of all feeling. Much like the divine Marie, I could not tell how distraught I was. When I did have a real girlfriend, I dared not by a flicker of the eye reveal as much to my parents, or even to Betty, who might have told Dot.

Impossible to admit that I had a sex life. They would have murdered me. Or, worse still, laughed at me.

In some ways, it became more comfortable to be at school – though there was always the dread of leaving home, of feeling that I was being kicked out. I never shed tears – except when I said goodbye privately to Tiny, who was growing old.

Ours became an excellent form as we moved steadily up the school. We laughed a lot. I endeavoured to read every book in the moderately well-equipped library. This was when I started on Freud and Gibbon and Eddington and anything to do with astronomy or the workings of the human mind. My mind was already giving me trouble. The novelists we much admired were Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Eric Linklater and J. B. Priestley. Graham Greene came along a little later.

Buckland was and is a sporting school. We played Chivenor, the nearby RAF station, at rugger, as well as various other public schools such as Blundells, outside Tiverton. All that strenuous exercise prepared us not only for the Army, but for life, to endure its hard knocks.

At the beginning of the autumn term, lorries arrived to collect the senior part of the school and drive us out to new agricultural developments on Exmoor, where heath had been turned into farm land. Acres and acres of potatoes were being grown. We worked from early in the morning until late, digging up long rows, turning up nests of those smooth vegetable eggs, while the sun sloped low towards the Atlantic.

It was backbreaking work. Our reward was to be driven home to school for mass baths, all grubby naked bodies steaming together, followed by a meal in hall of sausage with piles of mashed potatoes, our potatoes.

We also held drives for the Forces. At one time, a group of us, wearing clean rugger togs, pushed the school barrow around Swimbridge, collecting waste paper. We knocked on people’s doors. Sometimes they invited us in and plied us with cups of tea. Generously they gave, throwing out valuable books, sets of Edwards’ Birds, first editions of Anthony Trollope’s novels. But, ‘Us’ll keep us bound volumes of Punch, because them’s real valuable’.

What was really worthwhile went out with the rubbish. The mediocre was saved.

As in an inverted morality play.

3
The School

Suddenly, after a long silence, he began to talk … ‘A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.’

Carlos Castaneda

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

We held a ‘Wings for Victory’ fair on WBS rugger field, the Huxtable. It was a great event. Our vendettas against local farmers were set aside so that we could borrow their carts. I turned what had been shameful into satire against myself and became Adolf for a day.

Some years previously, one of the innumerable Framlingham bullies, a creature with the skin of a bullfrog and hyperthyroid eyes to match, grabbed me and declared that I resembled Adolf Hitler. Dragging me into his foul den, he pulled a lock of my hair down over my forehead and painted a moustache of black boot polish on my upper lip. I was then made to goose-step round a senior common room, giving the Sieg Heil for the delectation of all the other bullies – many of whom would doubtless have given their eyeteeth to dress up in Nazi uniforms, rape Slav women, and bugger each other while strangling Jews.

By Buckland’s ‘Wings for Victory’ day, I had sufficiently recovered from this degradation to put the act to good use. Suitably uniformed, I mounted one of the farm carts and addressed all and sundry in gibber-German, looking remarkably like Adolf. Or so my friends and admirers told me later.

Hitler still exerts an awful attraction. He has proved to be many things to many men. Hugh Trevor-Roper captured something of the truth when he described Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries.’

Well, that does sound fascinating …

It is terrible to think one should still hold Hitler in mind. And I once imitated him! Even the young and innocent are fascinated by wickedness. I suppose it helped prepare us at WBS to be soldiers.

To Crasher Fay I owe more than mere learning. For English classes, we had to produce an essay every Monday. I was excused. Crasher permitted me to present a story instead. A gratifying privilege as we trudged towards the School Certificate …

By this time, the writing of short stories had become a continuous occupation. Our form enjoyed, shared, quoted, laughed aloud at Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, as well as their less famous books, such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote ‘Invalids and Illnesses’. It was sanitary enough to take home, where my mother read it. I overheard her saying to someone, after reading out a funny bit about diphtheria, ‘You may not like it, but it is clever.’ Eavesdroppers seldom hear good about themselves; I felt she had summed me up.

Most of my stories were less sanitary. They were mainly planetary adventures, dirty SF, crime, or dirty crime. Screwing featured largely. I often wrote in the dormitory, under the bedclothes by torch-light. The stories always remained first draft. Penny-a-read was the nominal charge. Nobody paid, everyone read. It was gratifying. A superior fellow in the Sixth, a horn-rimmed Harrison, said, ‘Aldiss, these tales of yours are ridiculous and badly constructed.’

He was probably right. But I wrote compulsively, and risked beating and expulsion if they fell into the wrong hands.

I also wrote and illustrated a series of comic tales, ‘The Jest-So Stories’. At term’s end, Bowler and I put all the manuscripts in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and buried it in a rabbit burrow in the Plantation, from where we retrieved it the following term.

I became prolific. At one of my more acceptable sardonic stories, presented as a Monday offering, Fay took offence. After reading parts of it aloud, he stared hard at me and said, ‘I warn you, Aldiss, if you go on like this you’ll become another Evelyn Waugh.’ Never had I heard such praise.

Bowler was a great character. He, Saxby, and I were jokers-in-chief. Don Smith was a more sophisticated type. He brought a wind-up gramophone and played jazz records. We heard for the first time Tommy Dorsey and Orchestra playing ‘Getting Sentimental Over You’, and, ah!, Jimmie Lunceford and his band playing ‘Blues in the Night’, with the Johnny Mercer lyrics:

From Natchez to Mobile

From Memphis to Saint Joe,

Wherever the four winds blow …

And wherever those cities were, there I wanted to be. I saw the movie Blues in the Night, which features Jimmy Lunceford, eighteen times over the years, in England and abroad. Almost as many times as Citizen Kane. As an adult, I sang the song in duet with the philosopher A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayers.

End of term. Back to that dreary Bickington shop on the corner. And now great excitement. Following Pearl Harbor, the United States of America had entered the war. On our side. What was more, an American regiment was to be flown over to Fremington.

Fremington was next to Bickington; one village straggled into the other along the main road. Under Dot’s guiding hand, the Bickington Women’s Institute decided to give the Americans a slap-up reception. Music and dancing would be the order of the day. There would be food and soft drinks. No alcohol, since we had heard the American forces drank – unlike, of course, our boys. Everything was made ready.

The American regiment arrived. It was black. In those days, the US segregated its soldiery by colour.

What a fluttering in the dovecotes! Committee meeting! A sensible decision was arrived at. Black Americans were in the war just like anyone else, and would soon have to fight in Europe. The slap-up reception must continue exactly as planned.

So black troops poured into Bickington, and the party went ahead. It was a roaring success. The music veered from the hot—

I’ll be round to meet you in a taxi, honey,

Better be ready ’bout a ha’ past eight—

to the sentimental—

I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine

The Bickington ladies, including Mrs McKechnie, were delighted with their own wisdom. The black Americans were charmed to find themselves in a country without any colour prejudice …

At school, we made a discovery. Mr H. G. Wells was still alive! It amazed and cheered us. We were accustomed to reading books by dead authors; the books we studied were by the illustrious dead, from Hillard & Botting onward. But the great imaginer was living in London, a city more devastated by German bombs than by his Martians.

I read and wrote. Most eagerly I read Astounding, in which, to my mind, the future was being born. Chicken Coupland caught me reading an issue in class. Seizing it, he tore it into small pieces, damning it for rubbish. I had been in the middle of a Theodore Sturgeon story.

My difficulties with Sammy continued. The one master on my side was my housemaster, Harold Boyer. Harold was of mixed English-German descent, and hence presumably not allowed to serve in HM Forces. He arrived at the school in 1940 and went on to become a governor of the school and an HM Inspector of Schools.

Harold could teach anything. His manner was somewhat theatrical. He would prowl before us, slapping one hand in the other. ‘Facts, facts, you must have facts.’ He was making reference to the School Certificate exams, which began to loom over us.

He became head of the house I was in, and showed a genuine interest in our lives. Like Crasher Fay, he rarely if ever beat people. He was a humorous man. After I had left school I discovered just what amusing company he was. Harold then revealed a bawdy subversive streak, whereas in the form room he could resemble a one-man version of the Holy Roman Empire.

Like the other masters, Harold shared Buckland’s general discomfort. Unmarried masters generally had rooms within the school. Harold, being married to Isabel, and having three daughters, lived in a cottage two miles away in Charles Bottom – always known as Charlie’s Arse. Sometimes we saw the dark-haired Isabel pushing a pushchair up to school; this sight caused some excitement among the sex-starved.

Finally, our form came to the test – School Cert., later to become GCE. Although my militaristic spirit was rather more pinko than khaki, I had passed Cert. A, the OTC exam, a necessity for becoming an army officer. I was less confident about School Certificate. At that precarious stage in life, one’s whole future appeared to depend on the wretched exam. And I had not always paid the greatest attention. Was I not ‘Foo’, the demon humorist of the Middle Fifth?! (‘Foo’ was a favourite expletive used in Bill Holman’s prize surrealist comic strip, ‘Smokey Stover’.)

Sammy did everything to make life difficult. On the morning of the first exam, tension was high. We were to proceed into the memorial hall to widely spaced desks. On the way, I dropped my inkwell. Ink splashed over the stone passage. This Sammy seized on in a fury. Here was a chance to humiliate the comedian!

I was made to go down to the kitchens, fetch a bucket of hot water, and swab up the mess. One of the menservants could easily have done the job. As a result I entered the hall late and flustered. When I made a return visit to the school after the war, I observed a faint blue stain still marking the site of my accident: the Aldiss Memorial Blob.

We went through the exams, playing tennis between times. A week in limbo, isolated from the rest of school and from the future. At the end of term my report reached home. Sammy wrote on the bottom of the report that I had behaved so badly I did not deserve to pass the exam.

It was a low blow. Bill was furious. Was this all I cared for all their sacrifices? He mentioned in passing how much money he had wasted on my education. As usual, I stood before him without defence. Not for the first time I wondered why, when I admired my father so, I was mute in his presence.

After the ticking off, he and Dot were hardly on speaking terms with me. I could not explain. Before the most patient interlocutor I could not have explained the difficulties of matching two conflicting sets of interests, education and growing up. Indeed, these difficulties remain hard to reconcile. You strive to become adult, which means rejecting the control of your elders; yet to become educated you must submit to their discipline.

‘Your father is really upset,’ was all Dot would say when I tried to approach her. ‘You didn’t work, did you?’ She too suffered from conflicting loyalties.

That was always her role in our little army: the NCO between the Commanding Officer and his tiny conscripts.

Bill and Dot were an incompatible pair. Whatever had occurred between them in the early stages of their marriage, during the wartime years and afterwards, they stood together. When things were most trying for them, at the Bickington store in particular they saw the necessity for solidarity, even at the expense of their children. However greatly they had once disappointed each other, they remained loyal and devoted. Over all, they set Betty and me a persuasive argument for marriage and its loyalties – an argument I later found myself unable to follow.

Under the shadow of Bill’s silent disapproval, my fragile morale evaporated. Only at school had there been friends to turn to. I slipped under the ever-threatening shadow of my own disapproval. I took to climbing apple trees and falling out of them, but received only bruises rather than the desired broken neck. Even there I seemed to lack determination.

Successes glittered occasionally amid the prevailing shades of failure. I persuaded Betty to scale the north face of the roof and enter the deserted bakery with me. We established a museum in our old disused stable, filling it with stones, fossils and sheeps’ skulls found in nearby fields.

It was during this period that Mussolini was arrested and killed. We were treated to newsreel footage of him hanging upside down, like a pig’s carcass. How dare I make anything of my sufferings when the great world was undergoing a kind of death agony, and millions were dispossessed or dying? Who am I to cry out? No great religion has ever proposed that life is a bed of roses.

Those summer holidays were a sickness. The days wasted away, one by one. Exam results were due to arrive by post on 5 September. The day of my complete humiliation drew nigh. On 3 September, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, I woke early, cowering in bed, listening for the sound of the postman. I was determined I could not face the parents at the breakfast table. In the end, I felt driven to go downstairs.

The post had brought no communication.

Next morning, anxiety roused me. I sat hunched up in bed, listening for the postman, to crawl downstairs when I knew breakfast had come and gone and Bill was in the shop.

On the following morning, worn out by worry, I overslept.

I was awakened by both parents rushing into my bedroom, waving pieces of paper. A modestly brilliant result! I had passed the School Cert. exam with five credits out of seven, and thus had matriculated. So delighted – and shamed? – was Bill that he thrust a cheque for ten pounds into my hand. So astonished was I that I took it.

All my past is accepted. Yet still there remains regret that I did not reject that conscience money. I had never possessed ten pounds before; but it was my submissiveness that led me to accept the cheque so meekly, and smile while doing so, without a word of reproach.

The incident smoulders still. It seems to epitomise much that was wrong with my parents’ relationship with their lad – and the lad with them.

At the beginning of the next school holiday, I returned to the shop to find another change. The shop was still there, but Bill had bought a bungalow, Meadow Way, half a mile away, on the main road to Fremington. The accommodation was better and Bill could walk up to the shop every morning.

Such memories as I have of that bungalow are entirely neutral. It was bought, taken over, and we lived there. The pieces of furniture we possessed were arranged in rooms. There was no sense that anything might be improved; we had to take the place as we found it. Nowadays, having bought a house, one expects to make all manner of alterations; conservatories are added, rewiring is done, or perhaps an attic room is created. The place is redecorated. Such ideas never entered our heads as far as wartime houses were concerned.

In the same way, clothing had no style. I wore Bill’s cast-off sports jackets, and grey flannel trousers. I suppose everything we owned looked shabby, but we were unaware of it. In the evenings, after work, Dot and Bill padded about the place, smoking, in pre-war slippers.

On Christmas Day, there was Bill, at the ironing board, ironing out the wrapping paper from our presents, to preserve it in a cupboard safely for the following December. Parsimony was a kind of patriotism.

There was no going off on holiday in wartime. Betty and I walked all over the place and sketched and painted together. Betty attended an art school in Bideford and was already inclining towards costume. Unknown to us then, a pathway to the BBC was opening up ahead of her.

Dot was altogether a more cheerful person. She laughed a lot. Over the breakfast table, she would regale us with her ludicrous dreams, which generally centred around sexual embarrassments. She would lose her corsets during an important meeting at the post office; or she would be caught by a farmer relieving herself in one of his haystacks.

Much listening to the radio went on. Everyone’s memoirs of the war years include a compulsory reference to Tommy Handley’s I.T.M.A. We too listened devotedly, and spouted all the catch phrases. One benefit the war brought was an importation of American radio shows. So we learnt of Duffy’s Tavern, Where the Elite Meet to Eat, and became addicted to the Bob Hope Show with its signature tune ‘Thanks for the Memory’. Bob Hope was a master of one-liners. His description of a totalitarian state is classic: ‘It’s where they name a street after you one day and chase you down it the next.’

Another favourite show was Jack Benny’s, with his black servant, Rochester. We heard later, in the time of Martin Luther King and the raising of black consciousness, that Rochester came to be regarded as an Uncle Tom. However that might be, he was the character we liked best on the show.

Woods and fields surrounded Meadow Way, in which Betty and I strayed. We could also, with difficulty, get down to the rolling river Taw. I wrote and illustrated a book about our adventures, real and imaginary. One golden summer, possibly 1942, we picked blackberries from July until October.

Bill still liked to shoot. Rats in the store certainly. Also rabbits for the pot. Rabbit stew with dumplings remained to our Norfolk-bred tastes. On one occasion, Bill invited me to go with him, to a glade not far from the bungalow. I took my .22. As ever, I was nervous in his presence. He seemed so to despise everything I did.

We moved quietly down a tree-shaded lane. I was anxious to prove myself in his eyes. Rabbits sported some distance ahead. He signalled to me not to fire yet. I was a pace or two ahead of him. He wanted to give me a chance.

Happening to glance back, I saw that two or three rabbits had hopped out of the bushes only a few yards behind us. Without thinking, I raised my .22 and fired.

The bullet missed Bill’s ear by little more than an inch.

‘You silly sod,’ he said. I had never heard him swear before. ‘You silly sod. You could have killed me.’

We returned home. I was still trembling and pale. I went to my bedroom and could not emerge again that day. Added to my own crass act was the shock of hearing Father swear. In those more polite days, the harshest words were ‘blinking’, ‘blithering’ and ‘confounded’ … possibly ‘ruddy’.

Back at school, after the dull Bickington holidays, the times were still improving. When we entered the senior forms, we were allowed to join the Home Guard. It accustomed us to wearing khaki uniform, to working with men, and to travelling further afield. Sometimes we carried out exercises on those parts of Saunton Sands that were not mined, firing at each other with blanks.

The only real shooting carried out on that beautiful coastline was for British films. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra was filmed there, as was a scene from the Powell & Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.

The general Sunday procedure was for a lorry to call at the school early in the morning. About ten of us, kitted out, uniformed, with army boots and rifles, would jump in. The lorry would then drive around to nearby farms, picking up the troops. Very few of them had uniforms. Very few of them seemed to know what was what. We christened one farmer’s son the Trout. He did indeed look like a fish. One Sunday, the Trout climbed into the lorry with a poker sticking out from the muzzle of his Lee Enfield. He had used the implement from his hearth to try and clean the barrel of his rifle. There it had stuck.

Life in the Sixth Form is remembered with affection. After nine years – more for some poor wretches – at boarding schools, we had climbed to the top of the pile. There came a sort of breathing space in which to be semi-civilised, to enjoy music and the art club, even conversing with, rather than thumping, each other. We valued the artist Mr Lyons-Wilson, who drove over from Exeter once a week to talk to us of Botticelli and Gainsborough. Although Lyons-Wilson was not without his affectations, his own watercolours were masterly. Also we liked him because – as was the case with Harold Boyer – he was on our side. And amusing.

Most of us belonged to the Phoenix Debating Society, which brought the privilege of a separate reading room. We gave readings of plays and stories for the rest of the school. I argued about religion and was permitted to make funny speeches. We formed a school jazz band in which I was the vocalist, encouraged to yell out the lyrics to ‘In the Mood’. We inclined towards the Don Smith mode of jazz: that is, very bluesy.

You can take my meat and ham gravy too—

But I draw the li-ine when it comes to you.

Yeah man, yeah man, yeah man

The school’s four houses decided to put on house concerts to celebrate end of term. As ever, my situation was uncertain. I had passed School Cert. and was supposedly to study for A Levels, in preparation for my future career. The plan was that, since H. H. Aldiss had been shot from under us, I should become an architect and join my Wilson uncles’ firm in Peterborough.

I was inclined towards the idea. For that purpose, I had given up Latin in order to study German, because only with German went Higher Maths (the vagaries of the educational system were strange, then as now). But Higher Maths under Mr Coupland proved as far beyond me as had Lower Maths. You need the Higher stuff in order to become an architect. I coasted in that last year, and was therefore available for things more amusing than calculus.

Like the house concert.

Bowler was in charge of the Grenville concert, I of the Fortescue concert. With the assistance of Harold Boyer, I wrote all the sketches, poems and catches, and performed in many of them. It was my term. For once my labels, Foo, The Comedian, came fruitful. And instead of Sammy trying to destroy me, there was Boyer to encourage me, and to laugh.

Fortescue House won the contest. Applause and congratulations. Sammy kept out of the way, smoking on his Gold Flakes in his airless study. It was my finest hour, or at least half-hour, for the nursing sister Veronica Talbot was so delighted that she invited me to her room, gave me gin to drink – and kissed me. Yes, Veronica Talbot kissed me on the lips!

My last term at Buckland. Military service loomed. Several of our Six Formers sought for ways to escape call-up. Schemes for further study incurred exemption, if you were clever about it. I wonder how some of my friends who were clever then, and escaped war service to retreat to the sinecure of Edinburgh University or other seats of learning, feel about their strategy now. Confused I might be, but ‘dodging the column’ was never my style.

To adolescent anxieties was added one peculiar to our generation. We were caught in what Harold Boyer taught us to call a Morton’s Fork of a dilemma. By 1943, the tides of war were turning in Britain’s and the Allies’ favour. I became eighteen years old in the August of that year – ripe for cannon fodder. The question was, would the struggle soon be over? Would we be drawn into the dreadful mêlée, possibly to die on some alien battlefield? On the other hand, would we in fact miss out on the great male initiation rite of the century? These alternatives, both fairly ghastly, lived with us continually. We wanted neither, needed both.

We were standing shivering on the brink of a chilly sea, unable to take the plunge. I felt I had little to lose. During the holidays, I went to the Recruitment Centre in the Foresters’ Hall in Barnstaple to volunteer for the Army – for the Royal Corps of Signals. The sergeant told me that the Signals required no more men.

‘Why not join the Royal Navy, lad?’

It’s a man’s life. Sir Francis Drake, a Devon man, and all that stuff. There’s lots of promotion in Submarines, lad.

You bet there was. I left the Centre, in part relieved. No one, even at eighteen, when testosterone is swishing vigorously round the circuitry, actually wishes to be shot or drowned. Drowned, not. Shot, okay.

During that last term, an official letter in a khaki envelope came to say I was to report for a pre-conscription medical check in Barnstaple. Sammy gave his approval and issued a day’s exeat for the expedition. When the morning of 29 July dawned, I felt ill, but ascribed it to cowardice. After dragging myself down to Filleigh station, I caught a train to Barnstaple. It was a beautiful summer’s day. Like a slow poison, the war gave no sign of its existence.

The Forester’s Hall in Barnstaple High Street was occupied by the medical board, and divided into various booths, in each of which one physical attribute – height, urine, eyesight – was tested, as in a Kafkaesque fairground. The hall was strangely lit, I thought. Everything seemed glaring, yet remote. No one was making particular sense. I undressed as instructed. In the various booths, as each intrusive medical test was carried out, the doctors looked at me strangely. It was so cold. Some conferring went on among the medical fraternity. Someone thought to take my temperature. It was running at 106 degrees.

A senior doctor advised me to go to hospital. He was annoyed that I had appeared before them in such a state. When I told them where I had come from, they ordered me back to school immediately.

I could have caught a bus home; it was only two miles away. Instead, I caught the next train back to school. Again the three-mile walk up the valley from Filleigh station. I felt a bit odd. Half-way to Buckland, the school car arrived to take me the rest of the distance. The school car! Sammy must have sent it. Obviously, some sort of trouble was brewing.

But not at all. The medical centre had rung the school and strongly condemned them for sending me when I was so ill. Something like a hero’s welcome awaited me. I was bundled into the sickbay to a concerned Sister Talbot; Doctor Killard-Levy pronounced that I had pneumonia in one lung. I got into bed in a pleasant little ward, otherwise unoccupied, turned on my side, and fell asleep.

At that period, I found myself misrepresented as a hero. I had gone for the medical only because to have pleaded ill that morning would have laid me open to the charge of cowardice. Everyone was sensitive to such imputations in the middle of war. Still, this misrepresentation was enjoyable – and, after all, I had not bolted for home.

As far as I was concerned, it was all rather a joke, a fuss over nothing. Ridiculous to catch pneumonia in mid-summer. And in only one lung!

During the night I became feverish and cried out in my sleep. Into the ward came Sister Talbot, in flimsy nightie and wrap. Without switching on a light, she got on to my bed and wrapped her arms about me in a gentle embrace.

Responding, I went to put an arm about her, but slid my hand inside her nightdress and clutched her naked breast. The delight of it! That beautiful breast … It is the desire of every writer to be able to speak of things for which there are few words. It is particularly difficult to talk about sex, that ocean of sensations, where what is carnal seems sacred. There’s secrecy about bliss, just as there’s bliss in secrecy.

Soon her little nest of spicery, as Shakespeare calls it, was hot in my hand. It’s sufficient to say we then became lovers. It sounded such an adult word when I whispered it to myself. When I was recuperating, I was able to go up to Veronica’s little rooms, where much of the school linen was stored, to make love to her.

It was the great redeeming pleasure of all those years at school, a more meaningful kind of matriculation. And for some years after I had left, after I had come out of the Army, she and I sustained a pleasant relationship. She was fifteen years my senior. That too added a poignance, and a reassurance that there was no formal commitment between us, except that of pleasure and affection.

Oh yes, I was to discover what a fantasist she was, how deception was her defence against a wounding life. That I reported in my partial portrait of her in The Hand-Reared Boy. It made not a jot of difference to my feelings for her. If she needed me in ways I could not fathom – well, that applies in many affairs of love.

After all, I was also a fantasist, in believing myself to be her only lover. That was so greatly what I wished to believe that no opposing thought entered my head. Later, I found this not to be the case by a long chalk. That too – after the first shock – made no difference to my feelings for her.

So that last summer term passed, with friends, lessons, cricket, debates – and Veronica. Though I failed to realise it, all was in place for me to become a writer. A certain detachment, a facility, a store of reading, curiosity: everything was there except experience. A sense of my own inadequate personality kept this knowledge from me. I was content enough to go to war. As far as I recall, I didn’t much care what happened to me.

It was the final day of term. We had practised not swearing or smoking. The Sixth broke up casually as usual. Farewells were brief. Bowler and I had buried my stories in their biscuit tin in the Plantation as we had done previously, for posterity to discover. The usual eagerness to get home overtook us. Most of the school tramped down the road to Filleigh station. I remained behind. Someone I knew was coming by in a tradesman’s van to pick me up and give me a lift into Barnstaple.

My thought had been that I would leave Buckland without regret: or, if not Buckland, then those painful years of adolescence. Standing outside the front of the school, its buildings now all but empty, I felt the weight of an ending heavy on my shoulders. A phase of life, with its wearying sequence of lessons, punishments, discomfort and incarceration, had seemed to drag on for ever. In the last two years, it had provided its successes, had even become pleasant. As to what the future would bring, I had not the slightest idea. Prophetic gifts are rare; in wartime, one is all too aware of the fact.

Warfare is a whale, swallowing up its young like krill. Even as I left WBS for good, British and American forces were fighting their way through Sicily. Sinister railway trains with their packed cattle trucks were proceeding eastwards from Germany to the extermination camps.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor said of World War I that it was imposed on Europe’s statesmen by railway timetables; that that war was the climax of the railway age. In World War II, wickedness fuelled the trains that ran eastwards with their doomed thousands from the Nazi-occupied countries. The climax, not of the railways, but of human beastliness – so far.

Back at Meadow Way, I received my Enlistment Notice from the Ministry of Labour and National Service. I was called upon for service in the Army, and was required to present myself, on 18 November 1943, to No. 52 Primary Training Wing, under the aegis of the Royal Norfolks, at Britannia Barracks, Norwich.

A travel warrant and postal order for four shillings in advance of service pay were enclosed with the demand.

Failure to report on time would render me liable to be arrested and brought before a Court of Summary Jurisdiction.

So Britannia Barracks it was – quite a distance from North Devon. By coincidence, it was the same barracks to which Bill had had to report in 1914, twenty-nine years earlier.

Even the feeblest children grow up to become soldiers – for good or ill.

4
The Old Business

The burden of the long gone years: the weight,

The lifeless weight, of miserable things

Done long ago, not done with: the live stings

Left by old joys, follies provoking fate,

Showing their sad side, when it is too late …

Lionel Johnson

Experience

A time of war is comparatively easy to describe. One’s personal details can be crosschecked against grand external events. And an adult memory, working on adult time, has filed away its record, for good or ill. But to return to childhood, to the Permian mud of infancy, is to enter a more questionable area. We may see certain distant events with clarity. But on either side of the event, fogs roll in. And were those events in fact the events as they are ‘clearly remembered’?

My uncomfortable advantage is that I see – believe I see – much of my first five years of life with clarity. For when I am five years old, something happens to me resembling the fall of a guillotine blade, severing past from future.

Those early formative years can roll like a film and are as untrustworthy as a movie, however sincerely truth is attempted, for the movie has been edited by time.

It is mid-August, two o’clock of a summer’s morning. The newborn infant lies in its cot in that eternal present tense preserved in memory. It is a boy, with the slight blemish of a port wine mark on its forehead. It will be christened Brian Wilson Aldiss, thus bearing the names of both sides of the family. It cries a little.

It is born at home, in its parents’ bedroom. Its mother lies exhausted, a nurse hovering over her. She also cries. She had hoped for a baby girl.

The boy is a disappointment, and will be made to feel that keenly. It lies listening to its mother’s muffled sobs. The curtain of its life goes up; but, as in an Ibsen play, there is already a terrible past history awaiting revelation. One day, someone will knock at the door and then the whole charade of normality will fall apart.

Already deception is brewing like a thunder cloud about the infant. The deception will masquerade as truth for many years, and devour tissue like a cancer. The mother, almost without willing it, is brooding on a consoling fantasy which will survive undetected for sixty years, and accumulate a burden of anguish meanwhile.

This is the story of how, for much of that time, I was not so much living as being entangled with life.

Such is often the case with first-borns: but should I count myself a first- or second-born? For sixty years, that too remained a puzzle. No wonder the infant cried a little!

The name of the mother sobbing comfortably in her feather bed is Elizabeth May Aldiss, née Wilson, generally known as Dot. She is married to Stanley Aldiss, generally known as Bill. Bill and Dot always address each other by these invented names.

Something of their history is in order before the camera of memory turns its lens towards the newcomer in its cot.

The sepia deepens as we sink back into the late nineteenth century.

Dot is born in Peterborough, on 1 June 1884, the fourth child of Elizabeth and Allen Wilson, the other three children being boys.

The Wilsons are a jolly lot. Their origins are humble, but Allen has one great advantage to set against his ‘lack of background’, as people used to say. He has great charm of character. Unlike many charmers, he is industrious. He becomes a builder and rises out of poverty. A. W.’s and Sarah Elizabeth’s four children largely inherit these pleasing traits. In order of seniority – the children are christened Allen, Herbert (Bert), Ernest and Elizabeth May. Elizabeth May is doted on by all the family, the family’s dear little spoilt girl.

Although the film is blurred, we perceive that the Edwardian period is good for the Wilsons. The family moves to a bigger house, a solid semi-detached in a respectable street, which A. W. has built. My grandfather, prospering, never works after lunch at this time. He smokes cigars or plays billiards. He now owns four houses in Park Road, and becomes secretary to the active Baptist Church at the bottom of the street. He breeds pigeons; pigeons of all kinds and colours, pigeons with puffed-out breasts, pigeons with none.

Allen Woodward Wilson Esq. becomes President of the All England Pigeon Fanciers Association. After his humble beginnings, he is happy to feel himself to be a man of some substance. On the occasions when he goes away on business, A. W. wears a top hat and employs a small boy to carry his case to the LNER station.

The film is a silent one. Now comes a card bearing the ominous caption: ‘The Great War’.

In 1914, the brothers are of an age to join in the general slaughter. Off they go, Allen, Bert, Ernie, waving gallantly from the train as they leave from Peterborough station. The boys’ mother weeps as she waves until the train draws out of sight; A. W. raises his top hat. Their sons are starting a journey that will take them to the mud of the trenches on the Western Front, and captivity in a German oflag. At least they will all survive the slaughter, and live to tell a small part of the tale.

Allen becomes a lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of the Northampton regiment. Bert becomes a lieutenant in the 23rd Northumberland Fusiliers. Ernie joins the Royal Air Force.

The first German words I shall learn will be inscribed on a slender white enamel sign: Rauchen Verboten. The uncles will remove the sign as a souvenir from a compartment in the train which, in 1918, will bear them back to liberty and the rest of their lives.

The history of the Aldiss family cannot be told in great detail. There have been rumours of connections with the Norfolk Bullen (or Boleyn) family, who yielded up a wife for Henry VIII. This connection remains unsubstantiated.

More certain is that an old etymological dictionary gives our name as a corruption of ‘alehouse’. It sounds appropriate. The Aldiss family has always struggled through the centuries between alcoholism on the one hand and teetotalism on the other.

The progeny of a John Aldous, the first of whom was born in 1697, are variously registered as Aldhouse, Aides and Aldus. The first undisputed Aldiss is Thomas Aldiss of Beccles (christened 1726), who became a blacksmith and married a butcher’s daughter, Susan Creme of Diss.

A Thomas Aldiss was born in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast, in 1759, probably a son of the similarly named Aldiss of Beccles. He lived long and, like my paternal grandfather, like me, he ran to two wives. Thomas was a blacksmith. Evidently he prospered, or else married ‘above his station’. While his first marriage took place in Lowestoft, his second marriage, rather more grandly, took place in St Paul’s, in London.

Thomas handed down to posterity a few anvils and a number of progeny, six by his first wife, five by his second. One of the children by Thomas’s first marriage (to Elizabeth Brame) was Robert. Robert Aldiss continued the blacksmith and gunsmith trade in Lowestoft. He married Sarah Ann Goulder on the last day of January 1830, and between them they produced eight offspring.

Their oldest son, William, was born in the year of their marriage, in December 1830. This William Aldiss was my great-grandfather.

Draper William married Ann Doughty, of a well-known Norfolk family, in Swaffham in 1860. They had six children, of whom the oldest, Harry Hildyard, became my redoubtable grandfather.

H. H. was born in a house on the market place in Swaffham in 1862. The house still stands. He struck out on his own as a draper. In 1885, after the most dignified of courtships, H. H. married Elizabeth Harper, a farmer’s daughter. I have a Holy Bible H. H. presented her with, which has survived the storms of the years. His message in it is brief. It reads ‘Lizzie Harper. From H. H. A., as a token of his love. May 6th, 1881’. The message comes printed in gold, now faded, on a red label, increasing its air of formality.

My grandfather remains vivid in memory. He is a short, stocky man with a good, strongly featured face. His values are Victorian; above all, he is stern but just, his stern side ameliorated by a sense of humour – as when, in his role of JP, he fined his gardener five pounds for allowing his dog to chase a neighbour’s chicken. After the case, he slips his gardener a fiver, saying ‘After all, the dog was mine, and I couldn’t very well fine myself.’

From this time on, families are becoming less large, as health and sanitation improve. Elizabeth and H. H. had four boys: Reginald; Harry Gordon (my uncle Gordon); Stanley, my father; and Arthur Nelson, known as Nelson. There were two years between the birth of each child, Reginald being born in 1886, in Horncastle, as were his brothers.

Reginald died in the year of his birth. A stone stands to his memory in East Dereham churchyard.

The move to Dereham came some time before the First World War. There H. H. bought a failing drapery business and rapidly expanded it, assisted by his two surviving sons. H. H.’s youngest son, Nelson, was dead.

He died tragically. Mother often told us the story – we never heard of it from Father. Like Father, Nelson was educated at Bishop’s Stortford College. He was due to play in an important rugby match when he experienced severe stomach pains. He reported to the college sickbay, only to be told not to malinger. Next day, he collapsed on the pitch and was carried to hospital. There he died of a ruptured appendix, aged fourteen, another victim of the public-school spirit.

Perhaps H. H. and Elizabeth found there was no competition in the thriving little market town of Dereham. Certainly the firm of H. H. Aldiss Ltd prospered for some thirty years, from before the First World War until the Second. After the Second World War the business was sold off by Gordon’s son.

Yet the childish imagination experienced the Aldiss business as something as permanent as Stonehenge: and possibly remains affronted at its disappearance.

The premises stood in the High Street, looking up Norwich Street. It was in those premises that both my sister and I were born.

So the movie starts up again. It is 1925, still in the era of the silent film, and I come to the task of describing my own infant life.

My first five years are sealed in a time capsule. The capsule opens on the day of my birth, to close on 30 April 1931, some months before my sixth birthday.

As consciousness reaches out for the world beyond the cot, I find myself in a large flat above my father’s department of the shop, which is to say, the gents’ outfitters. Two of our rooms look eastwards, towards Norwich and the rising sun; they are above the front of the shop, facing up Norwich Street. Their windows are remembered as being many yards above the pavement. An astonishingly long corridor connects with a lounge at the rear. This lounge overlooks the shop’s busy yard and one of the entrances to the furnishing department, over which my uncle Gordon rules.

Near this rear end of the flat are clustered, on one side, a bathroom, a lavatory and a maid’s storage compartment (dark, polish-smelling, exciting), which contains a separate lavatory for the maid. The lavatory I unwisely invade at the age of four while the maid is enthroned – all in the interest of scientific curiosity. She is furious and later gets her own back.

On the other side of the long corridor are the kitchen, the pantry and another room, sometimes serving as a breakfast room, sometimes as a bedroom for a live-in maid. Further along the corridor towards the front of the flat are two bedrooms, the main bedroom, where my parents sleep in a double bed, and where a cot is sometimes accommodated, and a smaller room, all but attached to the larger. These two rooms are of immense importance: the centre of the universe, and therefore worth a pause as we look round them.

Both of these bedtime rooms, the larger and the smaller, face north. Like blind eyes, they have no view worth speaking of. In fact they look across the side entrance to the shop premises towards the uncommunicative sides of an old building.

The parental bedroom is where I am and, later, my sister is born. Between its two windows is a grate, where sometimes a coal fire is lit, for instance when I am ill. I have a memory of one such occasion when Dot has wrapped lumps of coal in newspaper during the day, so that she can add them to the fire silently during the night, without disturbing my sleep. The floor is covered with a shiny lino, cold to the feet. The lavatory is some distance away, so chamber pots wait under each side of the double bed. In this room, terrible infantile dramas take place. I will have to listen to screams of anguish from my sister as she resists having vests with tapes at the neck pulled over her head. Even darker things happen in this room, as will be related.

I am moved at an early age from my cot in this larger room to a bed in the smaller one. The bed remains in memory as almost insuperably high. At head and foot, its four posts are capped by elegant squares of wood. On the wall for my delight is a Rowntree study of bluetits among stalks of corn. A Price’s nightlight is provided for me, to stand guardian at night on the chest of drawers at the end of the bed.

It may be assumed from this that I was a pampered child; I was certainly a carefully guarded child; precautions were taken to keep me confined to the flat, and against this restriction I was in constant rebellion.

To the fortunate child (on the whole I was a fortunate child, though remarkably slow to realise the fact), the mother sings lullabies and nonsense songs. The child thus becomes acquainted with poetry and rhythm from the start. This is presumably how it was at the beginning of human life on Earth. The mother follows an archetypal pattern. In every literature, poetry precedes prose.

It must be understood that one’s bed takes some climbing into at first. Also that all doors are built unnecessarily tall, so that their handles are unreachable. All rooms are vast and full of strange smells and heavy objects. The corridor is so long that one can pedal up and down it madly on a red wooden scooter-affair.

Leading off the long corridor is a steep stairwell winding down to the shop and the outside world. At the top of this stairwell, a gate has been affixed, following an exciting incident when the red wooden scooter-affair has plunged with its rider down to the half-landing. On that half-landing stands an object of chinoiserie, an octagonal table with sharp legs, ebony, inset with slivers of mother-of-pearl, some of which have fallen out, others of which can be picked out.

In the front room, looking up Norwich Street, stands an iron-frame upright piano, given to Dot by her father on her wedding day.

This front room has a pleasant window seat from which to gaze at life as it moves in and out of the shops of Norwich Street – the butcher’s, the grocer’s and Mr Fanthorpe’s music shop. We do not discover until later years that Mr Fanthorpe also has a son, Lionel, who will grow up to be another science fiction writer.

The most interesting features in this room are its pictures. Framed in gold, here and in the long corridor, are desert scenes. Palm trees wave. Steely-eyed Bedouin gaze over dunes into scorching distance. Camels gallumph in camel-like fashion across the Sahara. Everywhere is golden sand, exactly the colour of the frames. Bill has been in Egypt during the war, that war to which constant reference is made.

Before I am very old, I find this home imprisoning. As I go from room to room, I am followed, talked to, instructed. Dot still lives out the nightmare of having lost her previous child, that paragon of daughters; this may explain the tense family atmosphere. I struggle against the unremitting surveillance under which my mother places me. I know that all about us, unseen, the necessities of commerce, the intense life of the shop go on, crammed with people, circumstances, adventure.

The window of the room which is sometimes a breakfast room, sometimes a bedroom, has a special attraction. I can slide it open silently without Dot hearing, and climb out on to a slippery roof. From there, proceeding with care, I can make my escape across a second roof. A jump, a swift heave, and I enter an open window some distance away from the flat: a small forgotten window …

Ah, now this is exciting – forbidden and therefore, of course, naughty … I am standing inside a room stacked full of big cylindrical cardboard boxes. Nobody knows where I am. In fact, I have arrived just above H. H.’s millinery department, situated over the drapery, the very hub of my grandfather’s dominions.

The millinery department comes to hold an irresistible fascination. This room into which I have climbed was once the sitting room of a person or persons unknown. Beyond the room is a little uncarpeted staircase. Breathless with bravery, I creep up the stairs. The boards creak beneath my sandals. The stair twists up to two attic rooms.

The shop fades away. The tide of its boxes has not reached this high. A little sad narrow deserted house remains. Its walls are covered with floral paper, much faded. On one wall, a framed sentimental print still hangs; a girl clutches roses to her satin breast. Each room permits views of unknown roofs. Each possesses a grate with a mantelpiece crowned by a cloudy mirror. If I drag a horsehair chair over to peer into one of the mirrors, I can see myself, pale and interesting, ghostly. Who am I? Am I a different person for being in this phantom place?

The chair is black and leathery, punctuated with big leather studs. There are gas mantles beside the mirrors. The whole place must have come out of History!

And no one lives here!

Over the years, I often visit this phantom house. It becomes one of my secret refuges.

Occasionally, one of the young ladies from the millinery department tiptoes up the twisting stair and catches me. She likes to give me a scare. This is a skittish slender teasing type of person, wearing a neat black velvet dress and shining patent leather shoes. Everything about her is pretty. She has black hair and red lips. Her eyes are dark and lustrous.

When she catches me, I pretend greater alarm than I feel. She seizes and embraces me. I am pressed against her gentle velvet-clad bosom. While I am small, she sits me on her knee. Later, we will cram together into the big chair. She kisses me, teases me intolerably, kisses me again. Ah, her kisses! Everything about her I admire. This diversion will continue for some years; what is mainly her amusement certainly becomes mine as well. The power she has over me is the power women have over men.

Was I ever again, in all my years, so tortured and delighted, made sad and raised to ecstasy, encouraged to dream, to pursue a scent, to feel more than myself, caused to sing and run about, and to cry – was I ever again to be so over-brimmed with emotion, so excited, so enchanted, or so crazed with longing, as I was by that dark-haired young lady from the millinery? Oh yes, indeed I was. Many a time.

As the slow years pull their compartments along, I learn that this little phantom house, almost entirely devoured by trade, is where Bill and Dot first lived when they were married. This knowledge adds to the attraction of the silent rooms: they are part of the secret life my parents led before I was even thought of …

Dot always said that when they were first married, she and Bill used to lie in bed between those walls with the floral paper and the cloudy mirrors and listen to the rats running – ‘like greyhounds’ – overhead.

The union of Wilson and Aldiss families resulted in a commission for my uncle Herbert Wilson. H. H. employed him to reshape and reface the shop. A thorough restyling of H. H.’s premises resulted. This would have been in 1921. Bert was responsible for the comfort of my parents’ new flat, above Bill’s outfitting department. Their first flat became absorbed by the millinery. He created a graceful façade for the shop. It featured large windows of curved glass, while an ‘Aldiss’ legend was set in mosaic at the entrance. Although the shop was eventually sold and carved up, Bert Wilson’s façade has been preserved.

Dot tends towards shortness and plumpness, is fond of saying she ‘suffers from Duck’s Disease – bottom too near the ground’. This contrasts with Bill, who remains tall and thin throughout life. Dot has brown hair. She keeps it under a hairnet at night because it is always trying to escape her.

Dot is a homebody, content to remain indoors or at least to linger in her garden, tending her mignonette. Bill, on the other hand, retains a longing for outdoor life. There is always this dichotomy, he wishing for the Great Outdoors, she for the Small Indoors. Many a time, when Betty and I are drawing happily at the dining-room table, Bill in passing will say, ‘Why don’t you go outside?’ His way of bringing up children is largely admonitory.

In her East Dereham phase, Dot is generally ‘poorly’. Dr Duygan arrives briskly with his black medicine bag, to prescribe whisky-and-soda and a lie-down after lunch. Teetotal though she is, Dot obeys to the letter. She keeps cachous in her handbag for when she goes out. This is another way in which you tell the sexes apart: men never suck cachous.

Suffering from teeth problems, Dot’s face becomes swollen. Gazing at herself in the glass, she complains, ‘I look more like a pig than a woman.’

Four-year-old son, brightly, placatingly, ‘You make a very pretty pig.’ Flattery will become his stock-in-trade.

Dot is amused. All is well, therefore.

Later in life, I come to realise not only that Dot suffers from depression at this period, but that she combats it by a method her son unconsciously imitates: she cheers herself up by making others cheerful, by jokes which often include making fun of herself. It is a kindly fault.

My role in life, according to Dot, is to remain by her side until I am old enough to be sent to Miss Mason’s Kindergarten, where middle-class Dereham kids are instructed. Yet I can easily give her the slip, to escape into the shop, becoming lost on the premises and beyond.

Downstairs in our hall are two doors, one to the outside world, where the step is scrubbed white with Monkey Brand, one into Father’s outfitting department. This department is immense, a cavern filled with many places for a young subversive to hide.

Rows of coats and suits, enormously high; ranks of deep drawers, oak with clanky brass handles inset; long counters; islands of dummies wearing the latest slacks in Daks; disembodied legs and feet displaying Wolsey socks; heavy bolts of suitings, wrapped about a wooden core; a repertoire of felt hats; much else that is wonderful.

And, above all, the staff. I have complete confidence in their entertainment, as they in my distraction, value. Betts, Cheetham, Beaumont, Norton and the rest. Their names over the years have become a litany.

They work long hours and must be frequently bored; nothing is as tedious as being a shop assistant (but at least they are not part of the dole queue that forms regularly down Church Street). They all wear suits. To look extra alert, they sometimes stick pencils behind their ears, points forward, or a number of pins into their lapels, or else they drape a tape measure round their necks. Safe from the dole they may be, but time hangs heavy; so the intrusion of a small hurtling body, ideal target for a knotted duster, provides a welcome diversion. Oh, what glorious scraps and chases among the fixtures! What laughter!

There in his little empire, Bill is at his most content. He is on good terms with his staff. Although he runs an orderly business, he too seems to welcome me in the shop, allowing me to run about as I will, providing a little amusement for the chaps.

His office is tucked at the far end of the shop, next to two fitting rooms. Here he sometimes interviews commercial travellers. When I published an article on the shop in a newspaper during the eighties, one of those travellers, long retired, wrote bitterly to me, saying how little he earned, and how H. H. Aldiss always paid as stingily as possible for his suits. He slept in his car when on the road, to save money.

As the slow Dereham afternoons wear on, a tray of tea is delivered to Father’s office. It comes from Brunton the Baker, a few doors away. Brunton makes the most delectable pork pies; it also does teas for businesses. Father’s trays include a small selection of buns and tarts. Any young hopefuls hanging about just after four are sometimes permitted to snaffle a jam tart.

Every evening at closing time, the bare boards of the shop are watered from a watering can and then conscientiously swept. Dust covers are thrown over the stock. The staff, young and high-spirited, departs, whistling into the night. The whole place becomes gorgeously spooky, and would pass muster as an Egyptian tomb.

So let me continue the tour of this lost Arcadia, to the front of the shop, past the little window of the cash desk, where a pleasant cashier called Dorothy Royou sits, past my uncle Bert’s front entrance, down a slight slope, into the drapery. We will proceed round the property in a clockwise direction.

The drapery is the domain of H. H. himself. He rules over about fifteen women assistants, all dressed in black. I call him H. H., but everyone – including his sons and my mother – addresses him and refers to him as ‘The Guv’ner’. The Guv’ner he is, monarch of all he surveys.

I am not welcome in this department. One does not fool about here. The ladies are far more respectable, and less fun than the men.

At the front of the drapery is the door into the street. Ladies entering here have the door opened for them, and are ushered to a chair at the appropriate counter. With their minds grimly set on fabrics at four and three farthings a yard, they certainly don’t wish to see a small boy skipping about the place.

To the left of the front door as you enter are grand stairs which sweep up to the millinery, presided over by sombre ladies. To the right, is the very citadel of H. H.’s empire, the keep of the castle. This is where Miss Dorothy Royou sits secure, with her little windows looking out on both the men’s and the ladies’ departments, receiving payments, distributing change. And behind her cabin, on to which she has a larger window, is the Office. The Office is situated in the heart of the building. Miss Royou can communicate with anyone in the Office. The Office is dominated by a safe as large as – and slightly resembling – the front of a LNER locomotive of recent design. Near this safe sits H. H. himself, cordial in a gruff way, impeccably shaved.

Every morning, H. H. walks to his shop from his home, ‘Whitehall’, buys his morning newspaper from Webster’s in Dereham town square, and then enters the establishment next door, the shop of Mr Trout the Hairdresser. H. H. sits in one of Mr Trout’s chairs and is shaved with a cut-throat razor by Mr Trout himself. He hears the gossip of the town before leaving and walking at a leisurely strut to open up his premises for the day. Bill is already in his department.

Before leaving H. H.’s office, you must notice the door on its rear wall, seldom opened. The old premises are riddled with more secret passages than you ever heard of in Boys’ Stories. The passage behind this door is dark, and leads – miraculously, to a youthful mind – back into Bill’s part of the shop, where you can pop up unexpectedly behind a counter, to the feigned astonishment of Betts & Co., who stagger about as if they have seen a miniature ghost. It always takes them a minute or two to recover from their fright.

To add to the fascination of this passage, it contains a blocked-up window. It is clogged up to knee-height by old sales posters and cardboard effigies of men in striped suits looking sideways.

Leaving H. H.’s office in the regulation way, you are back in the drapery. At its far end are two doors, one a sinister, battered, mean affair, probably stolen from Norwich prison. The other is more of a doorway: its double doors, painted dove-grey, have inset windows of frosted glass, adorned with traceries of flowers and ferns, and birds having a good time.

The criminal door slams closed when you struggle through it, while the ladylike doors remain always open, welcoming customers into an elegant showroom, where there are grey Lloyd Loom chairs in which ladies sit while sucking cachous and trying on gloves or whatever it is ladies try on.

You fight your way through the criminal door. SLAM! it goes as you pass into night.

Another secret passage! This one enormously long, so dark that it could be in the bowels of the Earth. Lit only by one light, halfway along.

The far end of the drapery tunnel is not the end of all things. A bizarre room without windows is situated there, all wood, all drawers, with things hanging. Too scary by half to enter. Take a right turn at a run and daylight gleams ahead. You can escape into the yard, and freedom.

Or you can climb a mean flight of stone stairs, which rises just before you reach the yard door. At the top of these stairs, you come (but not very often) into a huge echoing room under a high pitched roof, its stresses held at bay by transverse metal bars. It is a vast room, like a hangar for light aircraft. Several people work here, on either side of a long battle-scarred table. Sewing machines whirr. They are presided over by a huge woman dressed for all eternity in red flannel, matching the flames in her face.

‘What do you want, boy?’

‘I came to see how you were getting on.’

‘Well, keep quiet, then.’ The kid’s the boss’s son, ain’t he?

The red flannel terror has a gas ring burning by her side, guillotines being hard to come by in East Dereham. Things steam, pudding-like, but do not smell like puddings. Flat irons of antique brand and purpose heat over radiators. The denizens of this department are making felt and other hats and goodness’ knows what else. The red-faced Queen of the Inquisition has wooden heads which split in twain at the turn of a wooden screw. Pieces of material are strewn everywhere on the huge central table, as if laid for a banquet of cloth-eaters. The gas hisses. The pale-faced people stare, saying nothing. They have lived here for ever, their existence controlled by the huge terror in red. I turn to leave.

‘And shut the door behind you,’ yells the terror. She roars with laughter at what she mistakes for a joke.

There is someone else in the aircraft hangar, a man, the only man. Father calls him ‘Perpsky’. Perpsky dresses in a pin-stripe suit snappier, darker than anyone else’s, and manages to wear the tape measure rather flashily round his neck. He is bald and cheerful. He likes to sit me on his knee and tickle me. Although I do not care for this, I am too polite to say so. Father tells me to stay away from Perpsky. Later, Perpsky leaves H. H. and sets up on his own as tailor and outfitter.

So now you are in the yard, in the middle of the topographical tangle, with buildings all around, each devoted to different aspects of the retail trade. Removal vans come and go, the name ‘H. H. Aldiss’, complete with a curly underlining, large in mock-handwriting upon their sides.

Here is a giant Scots pine, which you can see from the sitting-room windows. It grows outside Bill’s garage. The Rover is kept here, square and black, inside its house with mica windows. It sulks if not driven regularly and its batteries go ‘flat’, although I detect no change in their proportions. To start up the vehicle, Father produces a double-angled key, inserts it under the front bumper and with enormous effort produces a faint coughing from the engine – polite at first, then furious at being disturbed. Exciting blue poisonous gas fills the garage. I love the smell of it and inhale deeply. The car runs on Father’s favourite petrol, Pratt’s High Test.

Behind the garage stands the engine room, where the shop’s electricity was once generated. Here is a huge brutal machine with pistons, levers and gauges, all unmoving and unmovable. It is silent now. Its day has come and gone: after the dinosaur, company electricity.

The outside passage to the left of the engine house is narrow and threatening. On its other side is a slim-shouldered wooden door, set in a crumbling brick wall. Once the door was painted red. Now it is a sort of shabby rose, and flakes of old paint can be picked off with a fingernail. It has a funny wooden bobbin latch – all part of a bygone day we cannot decipher.

Go through this door and here’s another puzzle from the past. A narrow lane with a gutter running down the middle, which ends in a brick wall; it is a little street leading back to Victorian times. To the left is a high brick wall, the wall marking the end of the drapery department. And to the right … a row of low, two-storey terraced cottages, three of them, with bobbins at each door. Creepy though it is, the brave can still enter the cottages, can even venture up stairs that creak horrendously as you go, to peer out of the tiny upper windows.

Not only are the cottages almost certainly haunted, they are stuffed with ungainly goods. Black enamelled bedsteads, for instance, wrapped about with twisted straw, babies’ cots enclosed in sisal. Here too reposes a huge old wicker Bath chair with two yellowing tyred wheels. The cottages are now stores, demoted and outmoded.

You creep away and come back to the yard. The yard is wider here, leading to the stables. On the right is the Factory, built, Norfolk-fashion, of knapped flints interspersed by rows of brick which mark its three storeys. Against the factory walls is my sandpit where I play. I build castles with tunnels sweeping through them. I use woodlice – ‘pigs’ – as the inhabitants of these fortifications. Sensing that they may not entirely enjoy this occupation, since I have woken them from cosy sleeps under stones, I make a vow to the woodlice that, if they will play with me, I will be kind to them for the rest of my life, and never kill a single one.

Over sixty years, I have kept my vow. Indeed, a tribute to ‘pigs’ is paid in Helliconia Winter, where they are called rickybacks, a more friendly name than woodlice. Rickybacks survive for thousands of eons on Helliconia, as woodlice have done on Earth.

There’s a fence opposite the Factory. Behind this fence is our garden. That is to say, Dot and Bill’s garden, some way distant from the flat, but much enjoyed by Dot. Father has bought her a summerhouse. It looks across the lawn towards the row of cottages.

These old cottages were built for the live-in staff, not of H. H., but of his vanished predecessor. Conditions in those little rooms must have been primitive. The gutter in the middle of their lane indicates as much.

Dot is fond of the garden and spends some time there, occasionally sighing and wishing she were as free as a bird. When her mother, Grandma Wilson, or Cousin Peggy comes to stay, we sit in the summerhouse. Grandma in still in her widow’s weeds, and remains that way until her death. I practise reading to her.

Dot furnishes it as if it is her doll’s house. She subscribes to Amateur Gardening, which gives away colour prints of flowers, generally flowers flopping about in bowls and vases. At least once a month, one blossom is seen to have fallen from its bowl on to the surface of a highly polished table. Mother cuts these pictures out and frames them in passe-partout – words to which I am for a time addicted, learning the eccentric way in which they are spelt. Dot hangs her pictures in the summerhouse.

My cousins and I are naughty. If The Guv’ner catches me, I get a yardstick across the back of my bare legs. Sometimes Bill gives me a more ceremonial whacking. I do not cry. What I most dislike is that afterwards he squats down to make me shake hands with him and announce that we are still friends.

God also gets fed up with my naughtiness. As gods will, he devises more subtle tortures than any mere father can. In the garden stands a low-growing thorn tree. I rush into the garden one day, shrieking. Possibly I am three, a peak shrieking time. I find two of the yard dogs there, growling furiously. They have chased one of the yard cats into the thorn tree. The cat crouches on a branch, looking down at the dogs, just out of reach of their snapping jaws.

My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury.

Next moment – in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery … we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling of an eye. It becomes meat. It becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching, stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh, running off growling in parallel.

For many months this terrifying image, and the guilt attendant on it, dominated not only my waking hours.

For ever after there was to be,

… that sorrow at the heart of things

which glides like water underneath thin ice,

Bearing away what is most innocent

To darkness and the realm of things unseen,

Lending our joys a meaning never meant.

Dogs were everywhere.

Bill and Dot, in their carefree days before children overtake them, keep Airedales. They breed them and at one time have fourteen. At shows around Norfolk and Norwich they win prizes. These are their happy times, before my arrival, even before the steel-engraving angel. Just beyond my sandpit stands a shed, later to be a tool shed, in which Dot boils up sheep’s heads and oats with which to feed the dogs.

Occasionally, after closing, Bill and Gordon would organise a rat hunt in the outbuildings, and send the dogs in. What a fury of barking! Into blackest corners rush the terriers, emerging with grey bodies clamped between their jaws.

The dogs are sold off one by one. Only an old lady, Bess, is kept as a faithful pet. When I am an infant of no more than a year, Bill and Dot are busy. I learn to walk – this is family legend, not a real memory – by clinging to Bess’s tight curls. Patiently the old dog goes forward, step by step. Step by step, I stagger with her.

When Bess dies, Dot buys a smooth-haired terrier we call Gyp. Faithful Gyp! He can be induced to pull a big wooden engine down the length of our corridor.

H. H.’s premises are a child’s ideal adventure playground. Full of horror as well as pleasurable excitement. I can be wild for a whole hour before tea time. My favourite film actor is Tom Mix. Tom Mix, the great cowboy star, and his horse Tony perform an amazing stunt. I talk about it for months.

Mix is being pursued by a whole gang of bad men in black hats. They are drawing closer, but he might escape by galloping across the railroad. Unfortunately, at that moment, along comes a freight train with many trucks, winding slowly across the prairie. It looks as if it’s all up with Tom Mix.

But happily – in the nick of time! – there’s one, just one, flat truck in the middle of the train. Without a pause, Mix spurs on Tony, crouches low over the gallant animal’s neck and – wowee! – they jump right over the moving flat car and are away to safety.

Much as I admire Tom Mix and other cowboys, I want not to be a cowboy but an Indian. For one birthday – but perhaps this lies on the far side of the Five Year Abyss – I am given a Red Indian suit, plus head-dress with coloured feathers (far too bright for realism, I think), a tomahawk, and a bow and arrows.

What I do with the arrows gets me into hot water. But an Indian brave can always climb and trees are meant to be climbed. There are two favourites in the garden and another just outside, crowning a rockery.

The trees inside are a laburnum and an elder. The laburnum slopes in such a way that I can swarm up it and on to the top of a brick wall to hide among the foliage of the second tree, the elder. He lies there, elegant and at ease, yet a threat to all baddies, until danger passes.

The tree just beyond the garden is much bigger, a full-grown elm. I find a way of climbing it. All things considered, it is wonderful. I have no fear of heights. Up I go. Elms become easier to climb the further one goes. I am able to gain almost the topmost, outermost twig, far above the ground.

This is a sort of paradise, to be above the world and its troubles, to be among the birds and rushing air. It’s easy to be up a tree. You hang on and make yourself comfortable. Everything below is transformed, amusing.

One thing cannot be escaped, even in the crown of an elm: one’s characteristics. I call cheerfully to one of the staff passing below, proud of my newly acquired skill. The staff takes fright and runs to tell my mother. She rushes from the flat, to stand under the tree in her apron and beg me to come down before I break my neck.

‘You don’t love me.’

‘Of course I do. Come down at once.’

‘Tell me you love me, then I’ll come down.’

‘I love you, you idiot, I love you. Come down or I shall fetch The Guv’ner.’

I climb down. I have discovered a secret weapon.

We still have a way to go to complete the tour of H. H.’s premises. Now we are far from the street, where a bonfire of discarded boxes burns almost continuously. It is confined within a low stone wall. My cousins and I dare each other to jump in. We wonder if this is the Mouth of Hell we hear so much about in church.

Next to the bonfire, the old coach houses, black-painted, now repositories for hay and straw, and the rat Utopia into which Bill and Gordon’s terriers are occasionally thrust. We are in the area of the stables, at the far end of the property. Here are cobblestones underfoot, to allow horse urine to drain peacefully away. Just opposite the coach houses stands the tack room, while further ahead are the stables where the horses are confined.

This region is presided over by one of the shop’s great characters. His name is Nelson Monument. Monuments still live in East Dereham. Nelson is the stable man from the late twenties onward. On ceremonial occasions, he wears a top hat and tails. Most of the time he is in cords, leggings and a big rough coat. His hasty temper is legendary. He has earned himself the nickname of Rearo. For this reason he, and particularly his shiny top hat, have become targets for the wit of Betts & Co. Rearo cannot enter the outfitter’s premises without catching one of those notorious knotted dusters on the nut. His furious response, as he looks about for the culprit, is always greatly enjoyed.

‘Oh dear, did something hit you, Mr Monument?’ Betts enquires.

Rearo retreats in dudgeon to his little tack room, sweet with the stench of horses. There a little fire burns, except in high summer, to dry out the harness.

The tack room stands next to the tool shed where Dot once cooked sheep’s heads. You can climb on to the roof of the shed and from there leap on to the tack-room roof. If by chance you have with you a sack soaked in water, you can lay it over the top of the chimney.

In a minute, reliably, Rearo will be smoked out of his den, and rush furiously into the yard to see what blighter done it.

There is no one in sight.

Outside the tack room stands a large metal water bin, wheeled. Occasionally it contains not water but bran. In the bran lies a chunk of rotten meat. The whole bin crawls with maggots, swarming from the meat. The stink is bad, the sight curiously fascinating. We do not, in those early years, entirely grasp the connection with human mortality. These maggots, full of blind life, are destined to be impaled on hooks and drowned in one of the Norfolk Broads during Bill’s and Gordon’s fishing expeditions.

Mortality is one of the mainstays of the stable area. The great black horses in their wooden stalls, where they stomp and kick restlessly, and look down with disdain on visiting boys, are funeral horses. All they see of the outside world is the road to East Dereham cemetery and back. Their destiny is to pull a glass-sided hearse.

On such occasions, the horses wear black plumes, and are preceded by my uncle Gordon, transformed into a comic figure of piety, dressed to look as black as the mares, complete with top hat instead of plume on head.

Like a Communist state a parvo, H. H. Aldiss will look after you from cradle to grave.

By the rear gates, we come on one last place to explore. A narrow exterior flight of stairs leads up into the top floor of the Factory. Here is a series of small wooden rooms in which the tailors live. Some sit cross-legged on a low bench. They mark their suitings with soapy triangular pieces of chalk.

These men are miserable. One is crippled. They do not wish to talk. They work long hours in poor light. It is too late to speculate upon their home life.

Everything in H.H.’s domain connects with something else. There is an escape route from the tailors into the Factory proper. The Factory is the major storehouse for all manner of items. A whole floor is given over to rolls of linoleum. They stand solemnly together in a leafless lifeless forest. The carpeting forest is more amenable. On the ground floor is a coconut matting forest, a very hairy forest, inhospitable to juvenile life. Yet in the middle of it is a secret nook, a hidey-hole among the prickly orange trunks. Here I take Margaret Trout, whose father shaves H. H.’s cheeks every morning. When we are snugly concealed, I kiss her.

She sits tight. I propose marriage to her. She agrees. The union is sealed with a toffee. Much mockery from Dot and Bill when they hear about it (from someone else, not from me; even at that early age, I know how to keep my affairs to myself). But that event is on the other side of the great Five Year Abyss. The engagement is broken off when I witness Margaret Trout being violently sick at school, just outside the front door, by the holly tree.

Another picture from this time. It illustrates a serial story in the children’s department of our daily newspaper The picture shows a small boy sitting by the hut where he lives. The sun shines brightly. He forms the shadow of his two hands into the silhouette of a duck. Unfortunately, the duck flies away. Thus, the boy loses his shadow. Losing one’s shadow is like the loss of one’s reflection, as happens in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and elsewhere. It is equated with losing one’s soul.

The boy travels the world in search of his shadow, to find it eventually in China.

The picture holds a grand mystery for me. I colour it, and wish to go to China myself. From then on, China becomes a permanent flavour in the stews of my interior thought. Impossible though it would have seemed to Bill and Dot, their son will in time mingle with Chinese people, and will go to China. He will wonder if that story was the first step along the way.

Now we have come to the end of our tour of The Guv’ner’s domains, except for the furnishing shop. The furnishing shop has staff doors opening on to the central yard, though its customers’ arcade and entrance is on the High Street. This is Gordon’s province and boys are unwelcome here.

We say nothing of what goes on underground. Two stokeholds feed the central heating of the various parts of the shops. Ferocious men shovel coal into boilers. Here, too, boys are unwelcome, in case they catch fire.

This great various place, the property of my grandfather, H. H. Aldiss, is where I passed my first five years of life, imbibing all its joys and terrors. It remains vivid to me, a complete little bubble of existence. To be exiled from it was to experience a burden of inexpressible loss. Of that loss I could speak to no one.

5
The Small Town

The tale of East Dereham cannot be understood without glancing occasionally at the wider backcloth of English history which commenced in time out of mind, and is still in the weaving.

Noel Boston & Eric Purdy

Dereham, the Biography of a Country Town

East Dereham is a peaceful place. Sleepy, some might say. It is a small market town, of some importance in the district. In the twenties and thirties, the cattle market was much alive. The bellowing of ill-treated animals filled the town every Friday.

When I was bustling through it with hoop and top, Dereham still had about its chops the brown gravy stains of the Victorian era. The High Street was illuminated by gas. As night fell, the lamplighter trudged along with his hooked pole, to catch one of the two rings on the gas jet which, when pulled, lit the mantle. The pallid gaslight was like an apparition: ghastly the faces of all who passed beneath.

The magnificent George Borrow, who was born in Dumpling Green, speaks of East Dereham as a ‘dear little place’. It is also a place with its share of horrors. Opposite the façade of H. H. Aldiss’s emporium, two shops stand on either side of the corner of Norwich Street. One is a butcher’s shop, run by Charlie Bayfield (admired and scorned by Bill in equal amounts); often drunk. On the other corner is a grocer, Kingston & Hurn, much frequented by Dot.

Just up from Bayfield’s is Fanthorpe’s music shop, where The Guv’ner buys me a wind-up gramophone for my sixth birthday. The gramophone comes with six records (‘Impressions on a One-String Phone Fiddle’, etc.). Beyond Fanthorpe’s stand the huge double wooden gates to Bayfield’s slaughterhouse. I watch as cattle are driven – whacked – down Norwich Street towards the gates of hell. Men shout at the animals. Although I am repeatedly told that cows never suspect what is about to happen to them, I remain un-reassured.

In they go, poor beasts, hooves slipping on greasy cobbles in their haste. They are forced inside the abattoir. The doors close behind them. Bellowings are heard. Scuffles. Thuds. Silence. All is over. Then blood begins to flow in a torrent beneath the double gates into Norwich Street. A red stream, a tide carrying pieces of straw with it, rushes in the gutter towards our shop. It disappears into a drain outside Charlie Bayfield’s sawdusty door.

Again a sense of incredulity. Could that stream be poured back into the cows, to make them live again?

Dot takes me and Gyp shopping. We meet someone Dot knows. The two women are immensely friendly. As they stand chatting, I bask in all the benevolence flowing between them. Dot is happy for once. This is how life should be. They part, seemingly with reluctance. Directly the other woman has gone, Dot is vicious.

‘Oh, how I hate that woman. What a hypocrite and liar she is, what a snake in the grass!’ So Dot cannot be trusted. Appearances deceive.

You cannot distinguish between adults telling the truth and adults lying. I do my best to faint. No luck.

Dot is friendly – or she pretends to be – with Nellie Hurn. She often takes me through the pleasant-smelling grocery shop, through a mirrored door, into Hurn’s private hall. Nellie, like us, lives upstairs. The stairs are dark. Everywhere is stained brown, adding to the darkness. I enjoy the thrillingness of this, and kick the brass stair rods that hold the stair carpet in place as we go up. Dot reproves me. She calls ‘Coo-ee!’ as we ascend. Comes a faint answering cry.

Nellie Hurn lives in the front room, which is entered through a bead curtain. It is like coming suddenly on the Orient. The beads hang there, multicoloured rain suspended in mid-fall. They are strange, confusing, as we push through them. Inside a dark room sits Nellie – sits or rather reclines in an adjustable chair. Nellie is pale from playing too much patience at a round brass Benares table. She smokes a black paper cigarette while gazing frequently out of the window.

I too gaze out of her window while the women talk. There stands our shop, H. H., with the windows of our flat above. So supposing I could get back there very quickly, terribly quickly, would I be in time to see myself staring out at myself at Nellie Hurn’s window?

Dot and Nellie sip tea from delicate cups with serrated edges. Dot takes her tea with sugar and without milk, whereas Bill takes his with milk and without sugar. For some years I believe this to be a sexual difference: all men do it one way, all women do it the other.

I never see Nellie outside her dark room, exempted from the world by that curtain of suspended raindrops. We visit other women in the town who also spend their years reclining, as though some nerve in their minds has been fatally sprained.

Kingston & Hurn specialise in teas. Dot buys it in packets which are made up at the counter. The tea is weighed, poured on to a flat piece of paper. The assistant smartly knocks this paper up into a box, folds it, seals it neatly, Bob’s your uncle. I long to have a try.

On one occasion, Kingston & Hurn promote Mazawattee tea. In their window they erect an advertisement which moves. There, larger than life, but of painted wood, sit Alice, the doormouse (asleep) and the Mad Hatter, at the tea table. The Mad Hatter pours tea from a huge red teapot. Alice holds out her cup then drinks from it, smiling with satisfaction. She then holds out her cup for more, and the Mad Hatter pours again. Alice drinks, still smiling.

She will drink and smile for ever. The Mad Hatter will pour for ever. He is relentless and will forever pour, and she forever drink, the tableau like a ghastly parody of John Keats’ Grecian Urn, the tea and they

For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

For ever drinking and for ever drunk …

I stand there, nose to the glass. Dot drags me home. But I can run upstairs to watch the display across the road. From our front window I get a good view.

They are still at it. The big red teapot is still dispensing its pretend Mazawattee. He still pretends to pour, and she to drink, pour and drink. The model works by electricity. But I think to myself that possibly Alice and the Mad Hatter have feelings: since they look human, perhaps they feel human. Perhaps they are forced to pour and drink, pour and drink – and all the while, smiling, they don’t wish to.

The existential dilemma overwhelms me. I cannot think my way out of the riddle. This enforced behaviour – all this enforced smiling – has wider and uncomfortable implications.

Of course I understand that this advertisement is simply a construct. But the incident of the cat torn apart ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ shows how narrow is the threshold between living and non-living things.

So supposing the figures are thirsty and want real drink while having pretend drink forced on them from that hideous red teapot …

And after all, we humans go on day by day, doing the same things automatically. Supposing we merely think we are real, the way Alice does in Hurn’s window. Suppose our feelings, like Dot’s, are insincere …

Are we stuck in a window with God outside, watching us go through the motions?

I am haunted by the Mazawattee Tea Paradox, Schrödinger’s Cat made flesh, or at least three-ply.

Dereham appears to be a God-fearing place. The religious habit in the late twenties and early thirties of the century is bound up with memories of the war, still fresh in people’s minds, and therefore with the social life of the country, and so with a patriotism that is now, at the end of our century, greatly diluted – probably for the better, the xenophobic element being also diluted.

In the United States, religion, or at least a frequent reference to the Almighty, is similarly bound up with social life, patriotism and big business (What’s good for God is good for General Motors). A kind of official optimism is also involved. Whereas in Britain the prevailing mood is more one of scepticism. It suits us better. The garment is cut according to the cloth.

This is well illustrated on Armistice Day, 11 November, commemorated with due ceremony.

The film is here an old documentary. For its viewers it is over in a few seconds; for those involved it is a caesura in their lives, rendered more weighty by that sense of time dragging its feet which important events engender. It is raining slightly. Dot puts on her cloche hat and her coat with the part-belt below her bottom. She scrutinises herself in a mirror before slipping a cachou into her mouth. Snowfire has already been applied to her chapped hands – the Snowfire pot bearing a brave image of a brazier of coals flaming away in the midst of an icy waste. She turns to her son and crams his arms into a small red mackintosh. We go downstairs. Taking up an umbrella from the stand in the porch, she leads the way to the market square.

Other people hurry in the same direction. All wear hats, the men with caps or soft felt hats or even bowlers, the women with various confections, some from H. H.’s millinery, their offspring perhaps in berets or ‘tammies’. Since I am only a little tacker, I also wear a tammy.

A considerable crowd has already gathered in the square. Uniforms, medals and banners are among them. People stand, solemn-faced, saying little. They are roofed by black umbrellas which make soft drumming noises as the rain falls on them. Everyone waits.

A silver band plays. Solemn marches and hymn tunes are the order of the day. At eleven o’clock, maroons sound.

Everything stops. Time itself dare not utter a word.

The men remove their hats or, if they forget to do so, have their hats knocked off. Heads are bowed. Traffic halts. In H. H.’s shop, customers and staff will remain in suspended animation for the Two Minutes Silence. All over England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, silence prevails. A silence of mourning and thanksgiving.

The maroons sound again. Once more, normal lay life resumes. Hats go back on heads. The inhabitants of East Dereham close their umbrellas, shake them, and return to work.

‘Mummy, what are you supposed to be thinking in the Silence?’

‘You can thank God that your father survived the War.’

But if he had been killed, I begin to think, then I …

The church in Dereham is dedicated to St Nicholas. In the middle of the nineteenth century, its benevolent vicar was Benjamin Armstrong, extracts from whose diaries have been published. But of greater interest to the world of letters is the smaller church in the market square, squeezed between two shops. It is as ugly as if built by Thomas Hardy in his architectural phase. Its ugliness proclaims that no beauty has meaning, except the beauty of God (see inside). One cannot think that any Eastern religion would embody in stone such an absurd thought.

This is our church. It commemorates the poet William Cowper, who died in East Dereham in the year 1800. We are Congregationalists. If the documentary film is left running, it will catch us every Sunday entering this place of worship, Bill, Dot and Brian, in their Sunday best. We are greeted by our vicar, a small lively woman, Edna V. Rowlingson.

Our pew is at the rear of the church, on the left as you go in. The Guv’ner will be here. Also, in the pew just in front, Gordon’s family, his sharp-nosed wife, Dorothy (née Childs), and their three children, Joyce, Derek and Tony. Not Gordon. Gordon is the organist. The Guv’ner will read the first lesson. Bill is ‘linesman’ with Mr Fox, and will move down one of the two aisles, taking the collection in a shallow wooden plate. The Aldisses really have religion buttoned up.

The interior of the church is different from anything else I know at that time. Not comfortable, with the seedy brown-sugar comfort of the Exchange Cinema, rather echoing voids and dumb surfaces, the solidity of pillars either being or resembling marble. The pulpit, into which our little reverend climbs to preach to us, is of the stoniest stone.

Miss Rowlingson is not shy. She speaks forthrightly, never forgetting she has children in her audience. All the same, we children are sinners like the rest of the congregation. Hell fire awaits us too. Oh, she’s convincing, with that terrible inarguable faith also resembling marble. For years and years to come, I shall wonder, Is it true? The first lie, the first wank, the first shag in Calcutta: Is it true about hell fire? Am I to suffer eternal damnation?

To capture the attention of her congregation, the Revd Rowlingson leads into her terrible themes with the beginnings of an interesting story. She might open the sermon by saying, ‘Last week, I decided to go into the country. I was walking in the fields near Swanton Morley, when suddenly I saw I was in a meadow with a large bull. The bull began to approach me from the far side of the field at an increasing pace. Temptation is rather like that bull …’ We are back with damnation, which may gore us at any moment.

A scarcely audible sigh of disappointment escapes the children in the congregation. There are three characters in this fragment of story, the person, the bull, and God. Of these three, God is the least interesting. We don’t know what the person and the bull may do, but God has made his position perfectly plain.

The bull has more options than God. He can charge at Edna and toss her, he can charge and funk it at the last moment, or he can simply walk about looking slightly down in the mouth, in the manner of English bulls.

It’s the person who has the most options. She or he can walk stealthily away in the direction of the gate; or they can run like billyo for the gate; or they can try jumping over the hedge; or they can stand their ground and address the bull courteously, as the man did with the lion in the fairy story, hoping the bull will turn away, unable to think of an answer; or they can quickly build a china shop in the field, whereupon the bull will pass into it.

Pondering such questions, I find the sermon passing pleasantly. For those expert with the divining rod, here may be divined the seed of my science fictional habit. I have always preferred to write about people than about bulls and other alien creatures.

Hymns with repetitive lines or meaningless words like ‘Hallelujah!’ are most boring. I like the ones with geographical reference. ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains/From India’s coral strand …’ Even better, ‘Before the hills in order stood/Or Earth received her frame …’ What a vision that conjures up. I imagine the world as a jumbled mess, swept by enormous waves.

At home, religious references are frequent, although often used sarcastically. If one sulks or asks for sympathy, Bill is always ready to intone, ‘The noble army of martyrs …’ On rising from bed, he greets rainy days with ‘Hail, smiling morn!’ Dot enjoys a misquote: ‘Just as I am, without one flea’. (We are rural; fleas are not unknown.)

The church has its claims upon us. One claim is particularly life-threatening. Visiting pastors come to stay with us over the weekends; we are so conveniently near the Cowper Memorial Church; or perhaps Bill is low man on the Aldiss totem pole. They visit; we house them.

The visits of pastors need much preparation. Dot and Diddy, our favourite maid, are in the kitchen by Thursday, wondering what they should cook for the weekend. How fussy is he? They work on the assumption he will be pretty fussy, and are often right. By Saturday morning, Dot makes a house search. As a religious family, we are forbidden packs of cards, ‘The Devil’s picture book’, and all that. But there are incriminating signs of our lack of genuine holiness which must be concealed.

The Radio Times, the paper containing lists of the week’s wireless programmes, is contained in a sort of stiff fabric jacket, on which Dot has embroidered marigolds. It must go. Far too worldly. My toys must be hidden away. Only Noah’s Ark, my beautiful shining Noah’s Ark, may remain, in view of its exonerating connection with the Old Testament.

What gets hidden under the sofa cushions is the Passing Show, a weekly family magazine. The contents might include a new way to cook a cake, how to make a perfect dovetail joint, an article on a celebrity such as Gordon Richards, the jockey, or Sir Malcolm Campbell, the world’s land speed record holder, readers’ letters, a short story, a cartoon strip and a serial. The serials include two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus stories.

These serials are illustrated by an artist called Fortunino Matania, whose individual style tends towards the female breast. For all I know, his real name is Joe Smith. The Italian name licenses him to give vent to tits at a time when they are still suppressed.

It is tits the visiting pastors cannot abide. So Passing Show goes under the sofa cushions.

Sometimes the pastors prove to have more whimsy than Wesley in them. Come Saturday evening, they have settled in, and sit companionably round the fire with the parents. The atmosphere becomes a little less stiff. The preacher ventures a joke. Perhaps he ventures to ask if Mrs Aldiss would be greatly offended if he smoked a pipe.

Why, no. Of course. Yes. Do. By all means. She will fetch him an ashtray.

And would he by any chance like a little something with his pipe?

Well …

Well, it happens we have some elderberry wine in the cupboard. Home-made, of course. Bill finds a little sip now and again is good for him.

Well. If you’re going to have one … I don’t mind if I do, Mrs Aldiss.

Please call me Dot.

The Lord has spoken against all alcoholic drink but, in His mercy, has made an exception for home-made elderberry wine. The berries come from the tree in the garden under which the Red Indians lurk.

All this delicacy, this hesitation, these taboos, may sound amusing to a later generation. No funnier than violence on the streets and hooliganism at sport and aggressive coarse language today is going to sound to the citizens of AD 2050. Nothing is really funny about the life of past generations: they had their problems and their pleasures, as we do today. It is simply that the problems in small particulars are different.

The caution not to offend, the delicacy over drink, the hospitality my parents offered (under whatever social pressure), the prurience over the innocuous Radio Times, even the dedication of these men who came and preached week after week – all that was how it was in 1930 in East Dereham. Yes, I am amused now; but that is my entitlement because I lived through it. And through it all runs something tender, a sort of unguarded wish to be better, kinder, decent, God-fearing – virtue as well as hypocrisy.

Poor Bill and Dot, how greatly they care, how greatly they are bound to the mores of time and place, as we all continue to be. For the Zeitgeist largely glides snake-like through our mortal lives, sloughing a skin now and again. And how greatly one of them at least rejoices when it befalls that they are exiled from this small town where the mores are particularly exacting.

But that crisis lies on the far side of the Five Year Abyss.

The Passing Show, with its pleasing title, lies on the far side of another gulf, the World War II Abyss. Its day is done. There is no family magazine like it now. But then, the family itself has disintegrated, if you are to believe the higher journalism.

How much brighter magazines are today. How they proliferate. How they specialise. Six on yachting. Seventeen or eighteen on cars. Twenty, thirty, on cooking and dieting. Fifty or more on PCs. On the upper shelves, rows of tit, bum and cunt magazines. No family magazine. Don’t laugh at the thirties, okay? Among major gains, something has been lost.

Little conformist that I am, I do not mind the itinerant pastors, since my parents seem to like them. I come greatly to like Edna V. Rowlingson. I recognise in this bright, sparrow-like lady a real goodness; of course, at the time I do not phrase it in these terms. I know only that it is pleasurable to be with her. Although I am only one of her flock, she likes me. She cares about people. For this reason, she makes a splendid preacher. Perhaps if you really know her, you will find she is truly concerned to think we shall all go to hell. I am sorry when Bill jokes about her behind her back.

William Cowper is part of the mythology. The ugly little church that bears his name is built on the site of the old house in which he died. There is much in that very English poet to love – not only his poems but his letters, which display a gentle personality.

Cowper believed in eternal damnation, as I did. This is one way in which the national mentality has changed over the course of a generation. We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result.

The film continues, an 8mm epic. Year by year, I begin to discover more of East Dereham. At the far end of the market place is the Cabin. It stands behind the newly built war memorial. You climb a stair to it, hence its name. Inside, Dot and her son eat iced cakes. A few doors away, conveniently, is Mr Toomey, the dentist, who profits from the sale of the iced cakes. I am rewarded with lead soldiers whenever I visit Mr Toomey and do not make a fuss. I never fuss.

The reason why we all keep Mr Toomey in business is because of a habit of Bill and Dot’s. By their bedside stands a tin of Callard & Bowser’s Olde Mint Humbugs. At bedtime, they pop these corrosives into their mouths and their son’s mouth. By the time the son is twelve, both parents have to wear false teeth.

Just beyond Mr Toomey’s torture chamber is the entrance to the cattle market, past the Cherry Tree pub. On Fridays, this market fills with life. To me and my cousins, it seems to sprawl for miles. Some animals arrive by lorry, others by horse-drawn carts. Many are treated with cruelty, made to hurry, to be herded into metal pens. They slip, try to escape, are heartily beaten. Cows, bulls, sheep, ewes, a few goats, some with kid. All are kicked and cursed into appropriate pens. Blood, excrement, straw, fly everywhere.

Into small cages are crammed many kinds of living thing. Ducks, geese, hens, cockerels, several types of rabbit, stoats, ferrets, their cages marked with a warning not to touch. The ferrets fling themselves in a fury at their bars.

Perhaps rural life is always like that. Respect for animal life is not high.

My grandfather, The Guv’ner, is a JP in the time I know him. I like to go and play in the grounds of Whitehall, where my grandmother lies upstairs in bed. Whitehall looks vaguely Italianate. Wide eaves and a tower, sitting in the middle of the building, account for that. Its windows are large, their sills on the lower floor coming to within a foot of the ground. An ornate verandah runs along the front of the house. The place has a peaceful and generous air as it sits foursquare at the end of its long drive.

The gardens run a good way back, past the asparagus beds, the vegetable beds, the two sunken greenhouses, each of which is patrolled by age-old toads, the fruit trees, to a wide lawn fringed by sheltering trees and shrubs. Spinks is H. H.’s loyal gardener, and Spinks’s loyal companion is H. H.’s dog, Spot. Spot is a wire-haired terrier. Three enormous black cats live at Whitehall. H. H. spoils them and talks to them, lowering his habitual guard.

H. H. bought Whitehall before the First World War in his cool offhand manner.

He is travelling back by train from London on one of his buying trips when he falls into conversation with another passenger. This passenger says he is leaving Dereham to live elsewhere and intends to sell his house. The Guv’ner says he happens to be looking for a suitable house.

The passenger says his house is fairly large, with good gardens and a field, the recreation ground, attached.

The Guv’ner knows the house.

By the time the two men reach Dereham station they have shaken on it.

Grandma Aldiss, the farmer’s daughter, once Lizzie Harper, is bedridden for as long as I am about. Dot knew her when she was well, and cherishes some of her recipes. One favourite recipe is for Pork Mould, a dish made with pigs’ trotters. When cold, it is turned out of a mould rather resembling a child’s sand castle. We eat it with Colman’s mustard, and plain brown bread on the side.

I do not recall Bill ever going to Whitehall to see his mother. Dot often goes, and takes me with her. Dot will carry fruit or cornflour buns in her basket. She will be in her cheery mode.

We proceed upstairs to a room at the rear of Whitehall. Here long windows on two walls look down the length of the garden and across to The Rec, as the adjoining field is known. Lizzie lies patiently in bed, year after year. Self-effacing in the background, a nurse attends her, wearing a starched cap, uniform, and black cotton stockings.

Provided I do not make a noise, I am allowed a grape or two from the fruit dish by the side of the invalid’s bed.

Why do I remember the room so well, with its long curtains with wooden rings on mahogany rods, and a wash stand with basin and jug on it, and the swan-neck brass light fitting over the bedside table, and the grey patterned carpet, and the general grey stuffiness of the room – and yet cannot call to mind a single feature of Lizzie, or anything she said? Or anything Bill ever said about her?

What has gone wrong? Two of her four children died. Is there some great disappointment in her life? She leaves no record. As far as I know, she makes no complaint. She dies in 1930 or 1931. I fail to remember the event.

Every Christmas, we go up to Whitehall for Christmas dinner. It is a serious commitment. Beforehand, Bill and Dot become anxious. Also present will be the rival brother’s family. Gordon with his sharp-nosed Dorothy and their three children will outnumber us. I, by contrast, skip about, because I shall receive a present from The Guv’ner, and it might be a Hornby train. He always knows what young boys like.

Despite a roaring fire, the dining room at Whitehall is cold. There is no central heating. Dot always complains beforehand, applying Snowfire and cachous to their appropriate stations. I know without being told that she fears Dorothy’s sharp nose, which bores holes in Dot’s fragile self-confidence. I know without being told of the rivalry between Bill and Gordon. H. H. ignores these tensions.

In the room above the dining room lies Lizzie. She is not brought down, perhaps cannot be brought down, to join the fray.

We are seated, nine of us, round the table. The maid brings in the turkey. And I disgrace the family.

This humiliating memory must date from Christmas 1927, when I am twenty-eight months old. If it dates from the next year, then it proves I am a backward child. For a christening present, the Roddicks, family friends, give me a silver pusher. I adore the pusher. It is a miniature hand-held bulldozer. The pusher has a loop for a finger to go through and a tiny shovel blade. With this, food is pushed towards a spoon held in the other hand. It is a device to simplify eating for the infantile or retarded. This I employ on The Guv’ner’s turkey, which in consequence has to be cut up for me.

One of Dot’s great triumphs is to have delivered me into the world ten days before my cousin Tony is born. This, it is felt, is definitely one up on Dorothy.

But – here is Young Hopeful on one side of the table, still having his food cut up, still using this babyish implement. It is a gift to the opposing team. On the other side of the table, his cousin is already using a knife and fork, although not wisely or too well.

The contrast is immediately noted.

Oh, Brian still has his food cut up, does he, Dot?

Sometimes, yes, Dorothy. It’s quicker, really.

You don’t find the turkey at all tough, do you?

It’s very tender. How is yours?

He’s quite good with his little pusher. Tony has been using his knife and fork for some months now, haven’t you, dear?

Yes, Mummy. Smarmy merriment.

It is a bad moment. More than a moment. I am out of favour for several days.

The contrast between H. H.’s two surviving sons is marked. Gordon is large, hearty, almost bald. He looks out at the world through owlish spectacles. The cashier, Miss Dorothy Royou, long after she has taken up another occupation and another name, tells me how Gordon persuades her on a drive into the country in his car and tries to seduce her. She refuses. He kicks her out of the jalopy and she has to walk home. Other young ladies in the shop, she informs me, suffered from the same tactics.

Gordon also keeps in touch with events at Newmarket and frequently absents himself from the shop to go down and watch the horse races. On Saturday, he takes his boys over to Norwich to watch Norwich City play. He is a sporting man, and can be found pretty often in The King’s Arms in the market place.

Bill is of different build and habit. He is neat and spare, humorous, good-looking, less tall than his brother. He never in his life goes into a public house, and is teetotal for most of his years. He works hard in the shop and does not molest the ladies – or so the historic record asserts. He does not bet. Only once do we go to Newmarket with Gordon. Once a year, Bill and Dot will put a pound on the Irish sweepstake. God goes easy on the Irish sweepstake, perhaps because the Irish are so Catholic.

Bill does everything his father asks of him, is submissive, dutiful. Whereas Gordon has been known to cheek The Guv’ner and please himself.

On a wall in our long corridor, next to the photograph of Bill in a pierrot outfit, hangs a photo of Gordon and Bill as boys. They sit companionably on a rug together, with two terriers standing by. They wear caps and have guns tucked under their arms. Once they were friends. The photograph must cause Bill pangs of regret.

The traitorous thing is this, that I quite like Gordon and Dorothy. I occasionally go round to the Corner House where they live, where Dot never sets foot. They appear much richer than we are. Their house is better furnished. It is a puzzle. Also Dorothy has a huge folding tray table with raised edges, made especially for jigsaws; we work together amicably on a huge landscape which includes huntsmen. I labour under the impression that Dorothy is nice to me. I like my cousin Derek. And Gordon is generally genial if overbearing.

Tony and I kick a football about in their garden. He sends it through a window and bursts into tears. So I am one up on him. I would not cry.

Dorothy tells me a joke I am supposed to riddle out: ‘The Queen reigns over China’. I know she does not reign over China, but eventually we tease out the word-play. She rains every night, into her china chamber pot.

We are all convulsed with laughter. Fancy thinking that of haughty Queen Mary! The mere idea of Queen Mary peeing sends us into fits.

I go home and tell the joke to Dot. She is far from laughter. It is disgusting and vulgar, not a joke at all. Like an earlier queen, Dot is not amused.

My picture of Dereham, which we leave finally when I am twelve years old, is coloured by the attitudes of my parents. Only later do I realise Bill’s dependence on his father: he was my hero, and I thought he depended on no one. I perceive his dislike of Gordon, his brother, I soon realise how Dot suffers from paranoia.

She loves to accuse everyone of backbiting, while indulging in it herself. She is sweet to everyone’s face, cruel when they have gone. She is nervous. She consults Dr Duygan, whose advice to drink a whisky-and-soda after lunch every day has not entirely resolved her unhappiness. She suffers from being overweight, so that we visit Yarmouth to buy Dr Scholl’s shoes. Her largely unarticulated view of Dereham is that it is a kind of prison. Narrow-minded, she calls it.

She takes books from both Webster’s, the bookseller, and from Starling’s Lending Library. Starling’s books come in a protective cardboard jacket on which is printed a legend: ‘A Home without Books is like a House without Windows’. Dot often reads the legend aloud to me. ‘How true!’ she exclaims. Or perhaps more mysteriously she will say, ‘Too true, O King!’, quoting I know not what.

Gorleston on Sea figures large in our lives. From Dereham to Gorleston is about thirty-five miles. Gorleston is beautiful, a small, elegant seaside resort, with a bandstand and a pierrot show in summer. While I like everyone in the pierrot show, my favourite is the comedian (‘I’m the one who makes you go ha-ha,’ he sings as he comes on). Later we shall live in Gorleston for a while, as reported, until war breaks out, and the world we know falls into little bits, and the jolly rude picture postcards blow away down yesterday’s beaches.

Before the Five Year Abyss opens at my feet, Dot escorts me every September to the Dereham fair. On one occasion, I escape from Dot and rush to see a sideshow where a man stands bare-chested, swallowing watches offered by his audience. He gets hold of a turnip watch on a gold chain. He tips back his head and gulps it in, lowering it into his insides link by link, as if sinking an anchor into the North Sea.

He beckons me out of the crowd. Horrified, I go forward. I am forced to place my ear against his chest to give a sounding. I hear the watch ticking, entangled somewhere among the sea wrack of his lungs.

The watch is hauled up again, glittering with phlegm.

Another time, Dot plays the Wheel of Fortune, to win a yellow Norwich canary in a cage. She bears it home in triumph.

The bird becomes a favourite and ‘sings its heart out’. Considering how it is imprisoned and can never fly again, the phrase seems appropriate. It (or she, rather) lays many eggs, which Bill blows, to keep the shells bedded on cotton wool in a tobacco tin. Both Bill and Dot are baffled by this sequence of eggs.

One day, Bill gets up to riddle yesterday’s cinders and lay a fire in the grate, when he discovers the canary supine at the bottom of the cage, claws in the air. Alarmed, he takes it out and administers brandy to it on the tip of one of its feathers. The bird makes a full recovery, and continues to chirrup its song for many a year.

Bill, incidentally, is an expert on birds and birdsong. I stand with him, mute, on the edge of a great field. He waits under a tree, gun at the ready, for something for the pot, a rabbit or a pheasant. He wears plus fours and a cap at a rakish angle. I wear a tammy and rubber boots. A strange creaking note is heard distantly.

‘That’s a corncrake,’ he tells me. It seems a curious name for a bird. Nowadays, I fancy, modern methods of farming mean that the song of the corncrake is no longer heard over Norfolk farmland.

The fair comes to East Dereham with the ripe apples of harvest time.

While we in the Congregational church are lustily singing that ‘All be safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin’, the fair people are gathering in on the outskirts of town, waiting to invade. Tony and I mingle with the gypsies, their dogs and horses – and probably Alfred Munnings RA. The large caravans, the big rides, the big roundabouts are pulled by traction engines. The engines whistle and scream as the lofty monarchs are stoked into life.

Here the film is unreliable. Clever editing suggests that every year I run in to town beside the turning wheels of one of these machines, along with other urchins. I do so at least once. The hint of perpetuity remains, so great is the delight.

The ground shakes as our traction engine rolls towards the market place. A savage man with a red kerchief round his throat shovels in coal, standing high above us, a god with a black face. The great painted wheels turn, the twisted brass barley-sugar sticks that support the roof gleam, the furnace looks like the entrance to hell, while the smoke tastes like a whiff of paradise. We run yelling beside it, drinking in its power, all the way to the market square.

At the far end of the square, the Dodgems rink goes up rapidly. Once, with my friend Buckie, I discover a half-crown in a car recently vacated. We rejoice in our luck.

A visual treat is erected at the H. H. Aldiss end of the market place. The big roundabout is built round the traction engine that powers it. Under the striped canvas roof, a parade of monstrous bright animals, cockerels, tigers, spirited white horses and dragons, dances round and round, up and down, barely restrained from breaking out into the crowd and freedom.

How the staff of H. H love the fair! During their lunch hour, their one brief taste of liberty during the day, the young ladies of the drapery department, like a flock of blackbirds in their dark dresses, fly towards the attractions, sweeping me up with them as they go.

There’s my flirtatious millinery lady, all tease and flame! She shows her legs as we climb aboard the roundabout. Already the music starts, the platform begins to glide! I am lifted high by her, by her giggling friends, up, up on to the most Chinese of dragons. It seats three people. It begins to move. Up, down, up, down. The young ladies clutch me. I smell their perfumes. We all shriek. The music plays. The day shines and blurs.

Ah, the music of the big roundabout! The wheezing lungs of the boiler blow breath through unfolding punched paper, creating a din as powerful as the music. They play ‘Destiny’, ‘The Sun Has Got Its Hat On’, ‘You Can’t Stop Me from Dreaming’, ‘The Skater’s Waltz’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and many more tunes.

At night I am put to bed. Dot kisses me goodnight. The fair is still going. It’s getting rough, now that dusk closes in. Drunks are about. Who knows what’s happening as crowds are drawn to the excitement from distant Toftwood, Shipdham and Swanton Morley – chaps with girls and whatever they do together. As I fade away into sleep I hear its music in the distance: ‘You Are My Lucky Star’, interpreted through that randy, wheezing music.

When I am older, I have a small sister to take to the fair. She loves it as much as I do.

The fair people come into the Aldiss shop, often dragging their curs with them at the end of a piece of rope. The men buy new suits, spending generously in heaps of small coin. By the time the fair is over, its stalls folded away, its glitter packed and gone, the rubbish and droppings swept from the market square and Church Street, the town is fairly hopping with fleas.

Dot stands my sister and me in the bath. She pulls off our clothes. She searches every inch of us for fleas and squashes them with a thumbnail, one by one.

6
The Parents

My father told me … that mine was the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life, which he had found by long Experience was the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness.

Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe

The film continues, in that eternal present of memory.

Dot at this period of her life is a moody person. She is in her early thirties when I am born. She has yet to recover from the death of her daughter in 1920, confronting her naughty son with the perfections of the dead girl, with the result that this phantom little person preys heavily on his state of mind. Studying an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – a copy of which no serious household was without – I see a picture of a man pestered by a small angel fluttering round his shoulders: there is absurdity and menace in it. From then on, the dead sister becomes ‘the steel-engraving angel’.

Dot has other problems. Bill’s health is one; his difficulties stem from the war.

He enlists in the Army on the outbreak of war in 1914, aged twenty-four. In May of 1916, he is transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the RAF). His number is 26047.

One period of the war he tells me about is the nightmare of a Channel crossing in a ship transporting mules to France, presumably to the British Expeditionary Force. A storm hits, the mules break loose below decks. Bill has to control them. I picture lamps swinging and blinking, hardly illuminating the dark fetid stables. Great black animals plunge in fright, showing the whites of their eyes. Amid the noise, the stamping hooves, Bill fights to keep the brutes steady.

Bill serves in Salonika. Later, he is gassed. He is sent to Egypt to recover. The dry air is considered good for his lungs. He is admitted to the 19th General Hospital in Alexandria, where he suffers from malaria. He flies with 113 Squadron in Mesopotamia.

Faded sepia photographs, kept in an old cardboard box, tell part of his story. Here he is in Luxor, among the ruins. Here he is by the Nile. Here he is in a topee, washing his socks. In most of these photographs he is perky and cheerful, as I first remember Bill – and puffing away at cigarettes. A photograph survives of him standing by an old Sopwith Something, leather flying helmet and goggles on his head, the image of Biggles, smoking.

He is involved in the Dardanelles débâcle, Gallipoli. But I cannot put a timetable together. Eventually, at the end of April 1919, he is discharged from what has become the RAF.

When approached in 1990 for details of Bill’s military career, the Ministry of Defence is helpful, but can, after so many years, produce only two brief documents. One of these documents shows that Bill is mentioned in despatches and awarded a pension of eight shillings and sixpence for seventy weeks. Presumably this is a disability pension.

Some time during the Second World War, when we live over the shop in Bickington, I discover a key which fits an old desk. Daringly, Betty and I unlock. In one drawer, to our mutual embarrassment, we discover a collection of washable condoms. In another drawer we find a document, written in Bill’s neat hand. It is an account in verse of his military career. Since he is something of an artist, he has illustrated it with sketches in pencil. We hear someone coming. Guiltily, we close the drawer.

What happened to this manuscript is a matter of guesswork. Sadly, it was not preserved.

Legend has it that when Bill’s ship bringing him back from the East docked in Southampton waters, he was so eager to get home that he dived overboard and swam ashore. He married Elizabeth May Wilson almost as soon as he had dried off.

Theirs is a modest wedding in Peterborough, with my uncle Bert as best man. It seems that even his father, H. H., on whom he so depended, was not present. Gordon, by contrast, marries in style in London.

Bill’s ill health continues. He is prevailed upon to lunch with Mother and me at a small table in their bedroom, at which, on doctor’s instructions, he drinks a bottle of Tolly’s Brown Ale every day. On the label of the bottle is a figure holding a torch aloft; perhaps it is Mercury. The novelty of this arrangement is appealing. On a Monday, it is generally mince, with triangular slices of toast.

A severe winter comes. Is this 1928? It snows at Christmas. Uncle Bert is staying with us. Bill is well enough to venture out for a walk. I am wrapped up like a small parcel. We walk into Dereham market place. All is silent under its white cover; there is no traffic. The horse trough by the war memorial is filled with a solid chunk of ice. But this is not a real memory. This is a photographed event. The film of the past has been edited.

What is real is the crunch of impacting snow under red rubber boots, the taste of air like a chilled wine, the wonderful sense of the world transformed. The knowledge that everything is miraculous can never again visit us as vividly as when we are three, and it is Christmas Day, and we are wrapped up like a small present.

But Bill coughs. It’s the gassing or the smoking, or probably both. I am frightened in the mornings by the terrible harsh noises he makes as he gets up and washes.

Poor Bill becomes unwell. In 1929, Dr Duygan says to him, ‘Stanley, if you want to survive the winter, you’d better go to a warmer climate.’

He books a passage on a liner and sails to South Africa for six months – rather a long winter.

Mother stands by the chest of drawers in their bedroom and weeps. I go to her and clutch her legs, the only part of her I can reach.

‘Don’t cry. I’ll look after you.’

It proves to be the sort of thing I am to say to women ever afterwards. Dot merely weeps harder.

She closes the flat. She takes me to stay with her mother in Peterborough. Uncle Bert is fun. Lions and tigers is our favourite game.

This is an exciting time in Peterborough. Dot’s brother Allen is getting married – rather late in life. He is to marry Nancy Perkins. I am to be their page. This responsible post is marred only by the fact that you have to wear shiny patent leather shoes with buttons.

After the ceremony, we all adjourn to Woodcock’s Restaurant, opposite the cathedral, for a wedding feast. This includes champagne. Considering that all the Wilsons are teetotal, this must represent a Perkins innovation.

Indeed, Aunt Nancy enjoys the good life. She is fun, and looks very pretty and stylish – perhaps the snappiest member of a family whose Achilles’ heel may be lack of style, at least until my sister Betty gets going. Nancy often trots up to London and buys herself a smart new dress, which we all admire. Her belief in jollity is perhaps a shade firmer than Allen’s. Of course, she is twenty years his junior.

Aunt Nancy becomes a favourite. She and uncle set up house in ‘Grendon’, which is north of Park Road, by the eponymous park. One spring, a robin nests by the latch of their side gate; the gate stands open for weeks, so that we don’t disturb it. Whenever I go to see Aunt Nancy, she puts her heels up on a chair, smokes and tells me jokes. Sometimes she tipples sherry. Later, fruit salad is served and I get all the halves of cherry.

Other important things happen while Dot and I are at Brinkdale that winter. We both get flu. Grandma worries. She remembers the great flu epidemic of 1919, when so many people who had survived the war died.

Brinkdale has its scary elements. On its upper landing, just where you have to turn the corner to go to the lavatory, hangs a sepia print of a Roman sentry in uniform, holding a spear, while behind him through a gloomy archway people are dying as flaming chunks fall from the smoky air. The sentry’s eyes roll upwards in a frightful way, as if spotting something disagreeable just behind me.

Grandma, to calm my fears, tells me that this is Poynter’s famous ‘Faithful Unto Death’. The doomy title does little to cheer me.

I must say something of that kindly and frail-looking person, my maternal grandmother.

Sarah Elizabeth Wilson is about fifty when Dot and her small boy stay with her in the winter of 1929. She is long past the climacteric when, in the eyes of small boys, people cease to be People and become a different species, the Old. It’s the difference between the frisky Atlantic and the Dead Sea.

Grandma wears elaborate widow’s weeds, and has never been out of them since her husband died. Her black dress is decorated with black beads and reaches to the floor. A frilled white collar fits tightly about her neck, much as Anne Boleyn might have worn when approaching the block.

Her face is almost fleshless, certainly colourless. Her grey hair is swept back and controlled by a velvet arrangement. She is a serious person. I am never able to warm to her. For this, I condemn myself. She is kind and patient. She will later play endless games of halma with me. And yet. Perhaps it’s the smell of lavender and mothballs …

Grandma has it good. For her, none of the struggle to live and keep heads above water which the rest of us experience. She has a cook and a maid and a mobcapped washerwoman with sharp elbows and a boot boy to help her. They all have their separate nooks in the rear of the house. Being a farmer’s daughter, Grandma is also an expert cook. Succulent home-cured hams, tremendous Christmas puddings and other delicacies hang in muslin like silkworm cocoons from the rafters of the cellar.

On her generous table are items of silver, cleaned once a week by the maid. There is a sugar sifter of particular fascination. She eats Grape Nuts for her breakfast, and takes the Daily Graphic, which she reads after breakfast. In the Graphic’s pages, I follow the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, and Squeak’s villainous uncle, Whifskoffski, who carries a round and smouldering bomb in his pocket, and is my favourite character. Whifskoffski is an old grey penguin and, though I know it not, a comment on the extraordinary events taking place in the Soviet Union.

When Grandma is ill, nurses march in, starched and proper, to sit by her bedside and command everyone with their Midland accents. She has a large family to worry about her every cough and sneeze. When she is well, there by her side is her faithful and jolly son Bert to escort her to the car, wrap her securely in a rug, and drive her about the countryside. She is never pushed from the stage of life by a younger generation. She remains always in control – though during World War II she once consents, but once only, to hide from German bombers under her solid kitchen table.

Dot and her son spend Christmas of 1929 at Brinkdale. All that remains of that occasion (but what a wonder that anything remains!) is a little Christmas tree in the back room, the drawing room, and the present of a drum. A bright tin drum, which the little drummer boy belabours exuberantly with two wooden drumsticks until he drives all concerned mad and is forbidden to play with it.

On one occasion Uncle Bert drives us to Milton Common, outside Peterborough. The uncles always tried to keep us amused. They throw away their dignity for the sake of a joke. No wonder we adore them – and behave ridiculously in return.

On Milton Common I find a small branch from which the bark has been stripped; it gleams white; I tell everyone I have found a mammoth tusk. Uncle Bert pretends to believe me.

We are there because the sun is about to go into total eclipse. We stand in the open, waiting. Gradually, a hole is bitten in the blazing buttock of the sun.

We drop our tusk.

The bite grows bigger. And now a mighty shadow gallops across the open ground towards us. We are swept up in it, as by a chilly tsunami. An eerie silence falls. Everyone is transfixed.

Then, in a minute, silver bursts forth on the right-hand side of the black disc. The sun is winning its struggle. Birds begin to sing again. Normality, swiftly returning, seems a disappointment. We walk back to Grandma Wilson, who has remained in the car, snug under her rug.

Eclipse or no eclipse, Grandma’s life is governed by pleasant routine. She walks down to the shops once a week, to Ross the Grocer and elsewhere, where she is received by men in clean white aprons, who listen reverently to her order as if to the Nunc Dimittis, and despatch her wants by errand boy that very afternoon.

Bill returns from South Africa with photographs of Table Mountain and is in better health.

Bill and Dot resume their life above the shop. Business occupies his mind. He must make it up to The Guv’ner for having been away. In the evenings, he and his wife sit by the coal fire talking business. Their faces are grave. They talk in the code of the shop.

Suppose we buy double K yards of it at U cis DX. With a mark up of B plus we can reckon on A cis BA, maybe, let’s see, A dat double C …

I hate this whispering, hate this code. It excludes me. Later, I take to Kafka like a duck to water. For the time being, I play with my Lotts’ Bricks and first Meccano set. I build a house for Uncle Bert to live in.

Bill has a repertoire of tricks with which to amuse me at table. He sticks his napkin ring into his eye socket for a monocle and adopts a highfalutin’ voice. When he jokes, I am happy and think how wonderful he is.

Shortly after Bill’s return, in the spring of 1930, I am standing in our living room in the sunshine. The door is open on to the flat roof, built over Father’s offices in the shop. It is announced on the wireless that a new planet has been discovered. The name of the astronomer involved is Clyde Tombaugh. The planet is to be called Pluto. It is the outermost planet of the solar system, and conditions there are bound to be pretty cold and dark.

I am thrilled. Though I would not have put it in such terms at the time, it is an extension of our imaginations. A whole extra new world that no one knew about. And how long had it been there …?

Not so very much later, I am reading books by. Sir James Jeans. Who, in 1931, could resist a book with the title The Stars in their Courses? Jeans speaks of Pluto as being ‘so far out in space that its journey round the sun takes about 250 years to complete, and so far removed from the sun’s light and heat that in all probability not only all its water but also its atmosphere, if it has one, must be frozen solid.’

Frozen solid. Its atmosphere …

Gosh, I’d love to go there!

Like all good astronomers, Jeans deals with time as well as space. Near the end of his book is another reflection that extends the imagination: ‘We realise that we are, in all probability, at the very beginning of the life of our race; we are still only at the dawn of a day of almost unthinkable length.’

I told an interviewer recently how greatly the discovery of Pluto excited me. She said, ‘But you were not five years old …’

But before schools and jobs are inflicted upon us, the universe is ours.

As related in Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, I was early subject to strange ontological dreams. More than once, I dreamed I had been a great wizard in a previous existence, perhaps in France. I had been burnt at the stake for my beliefs. Sometimes the stake with me lashed to it would crash into the blaze. I would awaken screaming. Mother would bound across the passage from her room to comfort me.

There are other dreams of falling, to be accounted for only years later.

We are now coming towards the September of 1930, when I am given a new pullover and sent to my first school. The Five Year Abyss lies over the horizon, rumbling closer.

For school I am well prepared. I can read and write. The two abilities are almost synonymous. They are greatly encouraged by Dot, who assists my reading by the making of little books. My first stumbling adventures in the alphabet are taken up with my crude drawings and bound together. The books are covered with pieces of wallpaper, cut to size, remnants from the furnishing shop.

At the age of four or five, I am on good terms with the tracklements of the main meat dish of writing: the pens, scissors, pictures, rulers, bindings, and above all the white paper.

How I love these little books! Dot is in a good mood and does not sigh too much when we sit together at this occupation at the dining-room table. She finds me a ready pupil. The books get bigger and more eloquent. Crayons are used. I win another prize.

So school comes round.

It’s not too far. I walk from the flat through the market place, past a haunted house, which stands empty at the top of Swaffham Hill, and up Quebec Street to Miss Mason’s Kindergarten. On the way, we play conkers or marbles or tag or anything. Someone has a slowworm in his pocket. He scares the girls with it.

Miss Mason is tall and severe, with red cheeks on which capillaries map the delta of the Nile. She is assisted by two other teachers. One is a fat panting lady, who comes to school with an ugly little pug dog, and has to have an inflatable cushion on which to sit in class. Her name, suitably enough, is Miss Payne. The other teacher is a trim and elegant lady who wears tweeds and has pearls in her earlobes to denote her superiority. Her name is Miss Ida Precious. I would learn Higher Calculus for Miss Precious. She never takes the remotest notice of me. I think to myself, Better that way.

We have French lessons almost at once. C H A T. CAT. With a picture of a cat, just to make sure. The two words are similar. No problems so far. We’re in deeper water when they try to tell us that C H I E N means DOG. On the face of it, the idea seems unreasonable. Education entails learning a number of unreasonable things.

We chant our multiplication tables as if they were psalms. Twice two are four, twice three are six. Only when you get to the seven times table do you start to wonder if teachers really know what they’re about.

It is in one of the breaks that Margaret Trout is dramatically sick, thus shattering our engagement. The promise to love someone for ever rests on the understanding that they will remain forever loveable.

There are other attractions in the playground. It is easy to tell girls from boys; they are the ones who tend to kick you less. Some are also beautiful. I am fond of one whose name has disappeared down the rabbit hole of time; she has short dark hair and wears a mustard-coloured cord dress. She is quiet and has a half-smile. She lives in the country, Toftwood probably. Jammed with me behind a sheltering water butt, she lets me look up that mustard-coloured skirt. Oh, the days when we ask – and receive!

As it must have done to a greater degree to parents born in Victorian days, it seems extraordinary now to recall how much sex goes on in Miss Mason’s playground. It was purely pleasurable, without guilt, the sort of playfulness one imagines Gauguin hoped to find when he arrived in the favoured isles of Melanesia.

One game is called Cows and Milkmaids. The boys are cows. They line up and the milkmaids come along and ‘milk’ them. It’s a colossal hit! Everyone loves it, except for little Clara Cream, who is regarded as too objectionable to be permitted to play. The cows moo with delight, the milkmaids work away. Scrunch scrunch scrunch in the trousers.

So enraptured am I with Cows and Milkmaids that, eager to share, I tell Dot about it. Dot flies into a morality fit. Horror is not the word. Sex is a bit of a sore point with her. She bids me sit perfectly still and not move. She phones Miss Mason. It is not enough. She dons coat, cashmere scarf and hat, and goes off to confront the lady personally.

I have no idea what the fuss is about. Which does not stop me feeling an uneasy and all-pervasive guilt.

What have I done? How frequently children must ask themselves that.

Just supposing Dot tells Miss Rowlingson …

So the game of Cows and Milkmaids is stopped. The interest remains. We were only exercising a natural curiosity in each other’s bodies. It’s a curiosity that lasts throughout life, and powers much of our art.

When I graduate to Miss Mason’s upstairs room – but this episode is on the far side of the Five Year Abyss – a gorgeous girl called Rosemary locks the door, tears off all her clothes, and dances naked upon the central table. We stand there enthralled, gazing upward. Rosemary is celebrating the attainment of puberty. Dark hair curls on her body, a special little wilderness among the barren slopes of her thighs. For days we beg her to do it again, but there is only that one performance. Perhaps someone else was fool enough to confide in their parents.

Every morning, as I set off for school, Dot comes to the flat door with me to see me on my way. This is what she says:

‘I may not be here when you come back.’

Perhaps she feels that this phraseology is insufficiently precise. Then she will say something even more dreadful as she gives a final tug to straighten my cap. The words are for my ears only; no one else hears what she says. What she tells me is the most dreadful thing anyone has ever said, though perhaps I will become accustomed to it when it is repeated.

‘I may be dead when you come back.’

After school, I drag my heels down Quebec Road, linger in the market place, in two minds about going home, about ringing the bell, about seeing if anyone answers. The steel-engraving angel is heavy at my shoulder.

I call the premises of H. H. Aldiss a paradise. So I was to think of it for many and many a year when we were exiled from it. But there is no earthly paradise; the Revd Edna Rowlingson was right there. Moments of beatitude certainly, but no long continuance.

If Bill is unwell, Dot also has her suffering, and much of this she passes on to her son. Something weighs upon her spirit. Winter depresses her, first spring flowers – the snowdrops, modestly hanging heads – elate her. She sighs and repeats that she wishes she were as free as a bird.

Worse, she would pretend to weep if I did something wrong. Why could I not be more like that dear dead little sister of mine?

What are little boys made of?

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—

That’s what little boys are made of

Her weeping, hand shading eyes so that face could not be seen, is a convincing performance. Only when Betty comes along is there someone robustly to reject this pantomime, this hypocrisy.

Worse still, Dot has a way of governing me. She has a threat far worse than Bill’s thrashings. When I misbehave, she delivers the threat.

‘I shan’t love you any more if you do that.’

This poison, too, she must have felt, lacked some precision. She developed a variant which I found more lethal.

‘If you do that again, I shall run away and leave you.’

I have lapsed into a past tense. The film of childhood is breaking down. Time is on its destructive course.

When these threats are issued, I am made ill. I am a robust and jolly little boy, rarely sick. However, I have what Dot calls ‘bilious attacks’. Dr Duygan is summoned, with his old black bag. He can find nothing physically wrong. The attacks are a mystery, to me as much as anyone else.

The attacks earn me a groat of gratitude: I am always sick into the lavatory bowl. Not a drop is spilt elsewhere. It shows commendable control.

Decades later, as a grown man, I face a similar crisis, and yield up a similar response. So I perceive the true nature of those puzzling childish attacks. They are a nervous response to Dot’s threats; attempts to spew out the poisons she pours into my mind. They are not ‘bilious attacks’. They are violent physical responses to emotional attacks.

My agony of mind is great. I resolve that if things become too bad, I will go down to the shop and tell Bill. He will make Dot stop. He will understand I cannot help being bad. But I never put it to the test.

I take to running from the house. I hide in the shop. I climb trees. I trot about Dereham streets. After dark one evening, I am run over by a bike. The man dismounts and calls anxiously. But I rush limping away, hiding in an alley until I’m better. I go home with dirty clothes. Dot is plaintive when she sees the mud.

This time she really will leave me if I continue to be naughty.

She adds details. She will run away up Norwich Street and never come back.

I go into the lavatory and throw up. Yet another ‘bilious attack’.

It is convenient that I now go to school. It gives Dot more time alone. Bill works downstairs in the shop, coughing his dry cough.

Dot takes it easy upstairs. She is pregnant.

I have no knowledge of this aspect of the universe, which later will interest me greatly. I do not realise that Dot is growing larger. I can summon no recollection of her sorrows and sufferings during those months.

What remains in mind is that I am induced to kneel by her side and pray with her every evening.

Dear God, you know how I suffer. This time, this time, please let it be a girl.

I kneel by her side, hands clasped together, eyes tight closed, less than the dust. I know I am her mistake.

1931 dawns. I am still taking the Rainbow and following the exploits of Mrs Bruin’s Boys, but my mental horizons are widening. Dot likes to be driven by one of the staff to Norwich. She takes me with her for company, so that she can keep an eye on me. She likes to lunch in a restaurant overlooking the market square.

She cheers up over a good meal and tells me stories of her childhood, which are many. Dot is also a good overhearer. She eavesdrops on other tables and can hear the most intimate confessions even while yielding up her own.

On one occasion, a little downtrodden woman is eating alone at the table next to us. The waiter in his white tie serves her condescendingly. She is timid. She orders chicken. When she has finished, the waiter returns and enquires if she will have any sweet.

‘Oh, no, thanks,’ she says. She pauses, then confides in a rush, ‘Yes, I’ll have the rice pudding. You see, I’m out for the day.’

The waiter retreats. And a new catch phrase is added to the Aldissian repertoire. ‘You see, I’m out for the day.’ It serves for many occasions.

The poor woman was evidently a domestic on a rare day off. Dot always finds this saying immensely funny and (I hope) immensely touching.

After lunch we may shop in Norwich shops. More to my liking, we may go to the cinema. Was it called the Haymarket or the Maddermarket? In any case, it had about ten years to go before the Luftwaffe blasted it out of existence.

In that cinema we see George Arliss as Disraeli. There is also Erich von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo. Very intriguing. The ventriloquist is taken over by his dummy. We see films featuring Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, with Gordon Harker. I like Harker. He is hard-faced, and it rains a lot in his films, not always very realistically.

A horror film is showing. All the men wear evening dress. A husband is regularly away in the evening. His wife, who is very slender, determines to find out where he goes. She dresses in evening dress, disguising herself as a man. She enters her husband’s club. To maintain her deception, she is forced to accept a cigar, which makes her almost faint.

She attends the club theatre. A magician comes on and asks for a volunteer. The woman’s husband goes up on to the stage. He is changed. He sprouts a terrifying lion’s head, all mane and teeth.

This film, name completely gone, ranks for many years as one of the best films I have ever seen. I am a bag of nerves for weeks afterwards.

When we leave Cowper church on Sunday mornings, we are never allowed to look at the stills outside the Exchange Cinema on the opposite side of the market place, where they put a big cardboard Charlie Chaplin outside whenever one of his films is showing. Not to look at the stills is a refined torture, because on Sunday they advertise the programme for Monday onwards.

We enjoy our own version of The Movies at home. Occasionally, Bill will shove away the great mangle which stands against one wall of the kitchen – the mangle in that I am exhorted every day of my life not to catch my fingers. On the plain wall, he projects slides from a magic lantern. They tell a story about pirates. The pirates glare bloodthirstily from their bright, crudely coloured discs. In a series of stills, they swing from the rigging and hack each other to pieces, in the manner of all pirates.

It is tremendously popular.

7
The Exile

Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed. All of us, finally, are exiles from the past.

Oliver Sacks

The Landscape of his Dreams

The spring of 1931 draws on.

It is the time in which to tell of my life dream. More than a dream, a vision of the kind which helps to shape one’s future.

I was five years old when the dream visited me in its first and most powerful form.

I am walking along a lane. The lane is long, long and straight, stretching into the distance, with fields on either side. The sun is low and red, round like a fireball, for the day is nearing sunset. I know I have a long way to go.

As I continue on my way, I see two people in the distance, standing in the middle of the lane. They are dressed in black; their clothes are stiff and old fashioned, belonging to another age. I approach with some apprehension.

The couple are evidently man and wife. They are waiting by the entrance to a church, which stands on the left of the lane.

The church is clear in the dream. It has a square tower, like many Norfolk churches. There are three arched windows, filled with stained glass, in the long wall of the nave. It stands at right angles to the lane, with its tower overlooking the roadway. I see no sign of a graveyard. The old man and woman appear friendly, and invite me into the grounds. We enter from the far side of the church.

Now it can be seen that the building is actually a ruin, the tower alone remaining intact. The body and roof of the church have collapsed, leaving only one wall standing – the long wall I saw as I approached. Using the fallen stone, persons unknown have constructed a humble dwelling – a cottage which utilises the remaining wall as its rear wall. The couple live in this subordinate lay building.

They welcome me into the cottage. I am weary and untrusting.

As the cottage door swings open, I see within a bright fire burning, and an aspect of homeliness.

Before I can cross the threshold, I wake up.

The dream is full of dreamlight – the light that never was on land or sea.

So impressed was I by this dream, and its vividness, that I painted the scene. It remained clear in every detail. So delighted was Dot with this painting that she showed it to all and sundry. I painted or crayoned the scene several times. It held apotropaic power. At one crisis of my later life, when I was leaving my children, I painted the scene again, and gave it to them, hoping it might bring them comfort too.

Such a special dream, a ‘lifetime dream’, such as many people have experienced, is open to many interpretations. There is no definitive interpretation, is not meant to be. On that first occasion, the dream radiated consolation. Later, it was open to more sophisticated reading. Nowadays, I see it as a prodromic dream, the dream of one who has a long way to go …

The paths of our lives cross and recross. At West Buckland School, there hung in the dining hall a framed reproduction of Hobbema’s ‘The Avenue’ (properly titled ‘The Avenue at Middelharnis’, painted in 1689). All we see is an ugly road, with lopped trees and flat banal scenery, but what a cross-referencing of reflection it awoke in me.

Later, in a print shop, I happened on one of Piranesi’s ‘Vedute’, his imposing views of Rome. It depicts the mausoleum of Helena, mother of Constantine, in ruined splendour. From its fallen stones, citizens of a later generation have constructed a humble villa. The villa stands within the embrace of the grander structure. Nightshirts hang on a washing line suspended from one of the windows. Here was my church again, in a more pretentious interpretation.

So paths of our inner lives cross and recross. And we have to recognise that though they may be magical for us, to others they will seem as banal and blank as Hobbema’s avenue. While writing of my own long avenues through life, awareness prompts that others have trodden them, others will tread them. Such is common human experience. It is common too, to wish to record the feelings that went with the events, just as we may suppose the Dutch artist in the seventeenth century was moved by the very ordinariness of his avenue.

In those early years, vivid dreams choked my sleep. I like to fancy they were the footfalls of a strong psyche coming into being, welcome even when rigged with alarm.

One Blakeian dream is mentioned in Bury My Heart. It is all light and flux, grand, impossible, implacable, the dream of a terrible thing in robes and fires advancing down our long corridor to where I remain helpless behind a closed door. The personage comes to seize me! He advances at infinite speed. Yet the corridor is also infinitely long. So, as in Zeno’s paradox, he is always arriving, never getting there.

This dream occurred more than once, perhaps between the ages of four and seven, then not again.

One interpretation is that this was a dream about being born, the long wait in the womb revisited, with intimations of movement about to become actual. A reading that fits more comfortably with my current preoccupations is that the foetus, as we know, recapitulates in its growth the phylogenetic history of our kind; so the time must dawn, at about the thirtieth week of gestation, when the assembling foetal brain gains sufficient complexity to generate a measure of consciousness – much as must have occurred at some period to our proto-humans as they gazed across their Pleistocene landscapes.

In that moment of profound shock, a man could look about him and realise he was, however little he desired it, a thing apart from his environment and from his mate. An individual.

This realisation – which I suppose marks the birth of Homo sapiens – finds its echo in the womb. We can hardly be surprised if a necessary acclimatisation to this puissant knowledge still takes place in dreams after birth, since dreams are a mode of communication with ourselves, and less subject to the foreshortenings of time as experienced by our waking selves.

I must not choke this book with dreams and imaginings, as humanity has choked its world with dreams and imaginings. When we, or our representatives, arrive on Mars, to walk those desolate distances in their spacesuits, they will find themselves on a globe empty of gods and demons – and will then proceed to cram it full with them. The shadowy Martian sunlight will surely encourage strange states of being, and phantasms.

Whether we shall then terraform the Red Planet, as many SF writers predict, to fill it with polytechnics and politics, remains to be seen. Perhaps Mars might be allowed to remain swathed in its own solitudes, an astronomical Ayers Rock, to be visited for meditation or honeymoon. And other harmless purposes.

So to that ominous spring of 1931.

The world’s economies are in a rocky state; later in the year, Britain will abandon the gold standard. Dot becomes more passive. Our evening prayers intensify. This time, this time, please let it be a girl …

A cot is brought over from Gordon’s furnishing department and rigged up as for a girl, with pink ribbons.

More and more of my time after school is spent among our maids.

Our maids are always of interest and sometimes of discomfort. Behind the respectable façade of church-going Dereham lurk many strange things. People sprout lions’ heads.

Our cleaning lady is a Mrs Rushden. She hails from Baxter Row, an old part of town, considered by all at Cowper Congregational Church as a Tobacco Row. Mrs Rushden is a dignified woman with a sharp face and sharp tongue. She has two children. Her motto, often quoted by Dot, is Nothing’s a trouble for the stomach.

She announces to Dot, early in their acquaintance, that she is not a washerwoman. She is a lady wot obliges people. Another one for the repertoire.

In later years, when Dot is older and wiser and we can discuss sex, she tells me that the father of all Mrs Rushden’s children is in fact Mrs Rushden’s father. ‘That’s Baxter Row for you,’ she says.

Much younger is Abigail. Perhaps she is only sixteen, teetering on the verge of middle age. She is pale, blue-eyed, of scrubbed appearance. She is the maid on whose privacy in her lavatory I intruded. I am curious about her in a way I cannot articulate. Possibly this is reflected in her attitude to me. She takes me out for walks. Something between us makes me edgy, part attracted, part repelled.

It is hard to tell whether she likes or hates me. I am Master Brian to her, keeping me at a distance, yet there is … whatever it was. Something like an unwilling conspiracy which neither of us needed.

Relationships are usually subject to development. Sometimes, though, they seem to exist beforehand, snapping full-grown into being when a pair meets. Only a glance is needed. It is this kind of decision, made without intellect, that leads people to believe in Fate. You may prefer genetics; an inexplicable thing still remains between people, luring us on.

One day, Abigail takes me for a walk and directs our footsteps towards her home in Baxter Row. I am reluctant. The row is very narrow. We enter a small house. I am unsure whether it is Abigail’s home or someone else’s.

Other people are there. They leave. They look back over their shoulders as they go. I have an impression of a bare room, through the window of which the house opposite looks too close. A girl remains in the room, younger than Abigail, blue-eyed, mischievous. Perhaps it is her younger sister. Perhaps I never knew. The younger girl endeavours to make herself pleasant. I remain alert. Abigail tells me to take my shorts down.

I say I do not want to.

She takes me gently by the arm and tells me to do as she says or she will tell my mother.

So I take my trousers down.

The younger girl comes near and stoops close to see what I have to offer. She does not touch. After a moment I am allowed to pull up my trousers.

It is curious to feel simultaneously humiliated and powerful.

To write of East Dereham with nostalgia would be easy. Yet it was no paradise. The shop was my marvellous playground, full of friends and enticements; for years I was to miss it dreadfully. On the other hand, there remained the abattoir, with the blood running in the gutter, where cows, like Jesus himself, were giving their lives that Man should live.

And what of that crude doctrine of punishment by eternal fire then being preached? Had anyone in Dereham ever had a new idea since George Borrow decided to speak Romany? And there remains the case of the Michelin man.

The Michelin man is dropped by van into Dereham market square. He parades about, advertising those excellent tyres. He is encased in the familiar Michelin trade mark. He’s a little fatty made of white tyres, with old-fashioned motoring goggles for eyes. All he can do is strut, or rather waddle, from one end of the town square to the other. A gaggle of boys, of which I am one, follows him about.

The man grows nervous and tells us to clear off. We persist. One of the bigger boys throws a stone. It bounces harmlessly off the pneumatic waistline. At this signal for violence, all the lads begin to shower stones at the unfortunate man.

He tries to run. We follow.

At first it seems like fun. But the man’s terror is palpable, as perhaps hounds pursue a stag because they scent its fear. The man runs into a cobbled side street. Here is a better supply of stones. I never throw one, but wait to see what happens next – the writer’s guilty role in life.

The boys have the man cornered. His fat arms wave helplessly.

They close in like a wolf pack. Bigger boys appear from nowhere, as at any unpleasant scene bigger boys have a habit of doing. They kick the man until he topples over. Boyish laughter, cackles, more kicks.

He lies in a corner, rolling from side to side on the cobblestones, like some unutterable crustacean washed up on a Permian beach.

‘Quick! Someone’s coming!’ A shout from one of the lads.

The boys clear off. I stand there. No one comes.

I make no move to help the Michelin man, indeed am frightened of him. I clear off in my turn.

I never speak of this unsettling incident to Dot, any more than I can tell her how Abigail made me expose myself. She might leave home if I did so.

But no. Dot is in the last stages of pregnancy, wandering heavily about her bedroom, sighing, applying eau-de-Cologne and cachous. A nurse is engaged to tend her for a fortnight or two. It is Nurse Webb again, sober as a judge, starched from stem to stern. And I have a misfortune that is to cost me dear.

I catch whooping cough from someone at school.

Whooping cough was common in the days before there were inoculations against it. It is extremely infectious. If babies catch it, they may suffer brain damage or die.

It is somehow typical of me to be ill at a crucial time, when Dot is about to give birth. It is the last day of April, the next best thing to the Ides of March.

The maids keep me in the back room. Trying to stifle my coughs, I listen as they read Alice in Wonderland to me. I am more or less aware of people in the rest of the flat, tramping about as if this were a boarding house. Nurse Webb, of course. Doctor Duygan, with his black bag. Bill, up from the shop. The baby is delivered in the middle of Chapter Six.

Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, ‘just like a starfish’, thought Alice.

It is a girl! Praise the Lord! This time, it is a girl! No tears from the mother this time. Our united prayers have been answered with unusual efficiency.

Bill enters the back room, flustered and uttering a series of short, sharp edicts. I must get some shoes on. He is going to take me to Grandma Wilson immediately. I cannot stay in the house in my infectious state.

A little suitcase is already packed.

I am bewildered.

But why—?

I just told you. Come along.

I am allowed as far as the threshold of the maternal bedroom. Dot is in bed. She lifts up in triumph a little wizened howling thing. A cursory glance suggests it is much like Alice’s starfish. Its mouth is open and bright red. Scarcely less red is the rest of it.

Elizabeth Joy, my sister Betty, has emerged successfully into the world and looks none too pleased about it. She sums up what she sees in a shrill bawl.

Only a glimpse is permitted me. It is enough. Peering back into the past, you find some episodes are written in mist, some on stone. Here is stone enough to last as long as life. The overheated room, those windows looking out to blank walls, the nurse in the background with her starched bosom, the rumpled bed, the triumphant, sweating woman in the bed, the scarlet babe, howling as it is held aloft like a banner – only a glimpse is needed. The tableau is going to remain for ever.

I have no words.

Bill gets me downstairs and into the car. I clutch the suitcase. We head for Peterborough.

When will I come back home? I ask Bill. Bill does not know.

The film ends.

John Bowlby, who died in 1990, was a towering figure in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis. His monumental work is in three volumes entitled Attachment, Separation: anxiety and anger and Loss: sadness and depression. They appeared respectively in 1969, 1973 and 1980. I could not read them properly for the overwhelming sense of sorrow they conveyed.

In one of his other books, Child Care and the Growth of Love, Bowlby has this to say:

It is common in Western communities to see in the removal of a child from home the solution to many a family problem, without there being any appreciation of the gravity of the step and, often, without there being any clear plan for the future. It is too often forgotten that in removing a child of five from home direct responsibility is taken for his future health and happiness for a decade to come, and that in removing an infant the crippling of his character is at risk.

From all this the trite conclusion is reached that family life is of pre-eminent importance and that ‘there’s no place like home’.

So, in an extreme state of bewilderment, I was dropped at my grandmother’s house. There Bill left me.

My grandmother’s house was to me what the blacking factory was to Charles Dickens. So greatly did that enforced stay fill me with guilt and dismay, that I dared speak of it to no one until I was well into adulthood.

The Five Year Abyss swallowed me up. I stayed in Peterborough in Grandma Wilson’s house for six months before being allowed to return to Dereham.

Wait. That is untrue. That is what I believed for many years, until I was adult and out of the Army, sufficiently hardened to look back into that exile. There were details I could check. Whereupon I found I was kept away from home not for six months, but a mere six weeks.

I could scarcely credit it. How long did Charles Dickens spend in the blacking factory? We know the humiliation of that episode in Dickens’ childhood went so deep that he was unable to speak of it until he was a middle-aged man.

And supposing it had been six months. The exile seemed to stretch for ever throughout boyhood, parching it like a bitter wind. Nothing grew. At night I lay awake, mute, alone.

The woman still lay in her rumpled bed, grinning as she held aloft a screaming child.

At last I had been replaced.

On that last day of April, snatched from home, I was simply stunned. I recall Bill’s hasty leave-taking, as he deposited me with Grandma and Uncle Bert at Brinkdale and then turned back for home and his wife and new child.

Here we are again, happy as can be—

All good pals and jolly good companee …

It was one of uncle’s many snatches of song he liked to sing on any suitable occasion. And how well he and Grandma looked after me in those weeks.

And how ill I was. The chest X-ray showed no complications. The doctor held up the misty mysterious plate, where for the first time I could look into the seemingly empty interiors of myself, or at any rate of a person resembling a ghostly mummy. There I saw a section of my skeleton, waiting patiently for its true birthday in three score and ten years’ time, when it would emerge from entombment in the flesh.

In the year that H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine was published in London, a paper was published in the city of Würzburg by Wilhelm Roentgen, entitled ‘Uber eine neue Art von Strahlen’. The new rays were X-rays. The ghostly outlines of Frau Roentgen’s hand may still be seen, complete with a ring on one bony finger. The plate is as precious an artifact, in its way, as the great Tiepolo ceiling adorning Würzburg Residenz. The human body, resplendent in the vision of the Venetian artist, garbed in fine raiment, has become transparent, without colour, shadowy, permeable.

And shadowy and permeable I felt. My illness was not merely physical. It was the illness of a child, in Bowlby’s words, crippled.

No teddy bear ever accompanied me to bed. Instead, a golliwog called Peter played sentry to my soul through the night watches. Peter was an invention of Dot’s. He was black because he was constructed of the tops of one of the maid’s cast-off black stockings.

Peter’s soggy shape was clothed in garments Dot knitted or made up from pieces of felt. Two linen buttons such as served in the 1920s to secure underpants were used as Peter’s blind, staring eyes. The mouth was a curve of green wool, the hair a startling red crew cut. Small wonder I have had a taste for the macabre ever since!

And the first night I was tucked between Grandma’s sheets in a small feather bed, sick and homesick, I whooped and vomited all over Peter.

My faithful golliwog was taken away and destroyed.

My cousins Peggy and John sometimes waved to me on their way to school, as I watched through the window. They were allowed no nearer for fear of infection. Peggy’s sweet round smiling face was something to be looked for. When I ceased to be infectious, this dear cousin would take me by the hand and lead me about Peterborough. I never knew her other than gentle. Yet there was a shadow over her and her brother John’s life: their mother, May Wilson (née Schofield), had died a year or two earlier of tuberculosis.

A compound of illness and remorse, I had been sent away, unwanted boy child, as soon as the girl child had arrived. I had much offended in ways beyond my comprehension. My mood was one of self-abnegation – and yet I could not help throwing up all over Granny’s house.

I was not getting better. The doctor came again. The sticky medicine I had been given – ‘A Tablespoonful at Bedtime’ – had completed the work begun by Callard & Bowser’s Mint Humbugs. My milk teeth were rotting and would have to come out.

Uncle Bert took me to his dentist. The dentist produced a sort of dunce’s cap made of flannel, which he soaked in chloroform. Instructing me to count to a hundred, he placed the cap over my face. I looked up into it and began to count … and when I woke, twelve of my teeth had been extracted. Uncle carried me back to the car in his arms. A limp and gummy sight I was.

Although I wanted to die in peace, the life force of which George Bernard Shaw spoke so highly asserted itself. I sat up in Grandma’s narrow front room, surrounded by framed photographs of my grandfather’s champion pigeons and the certificates they had won, and ate a little white fish for supper, garnished with fresh blood.

One consolation of living with Grandma was access to ‘the Fireby-Wireby Book’. This was the name I gave, at a very early age, to A. Moreland’s Humors of History: 160 Drawings in Color.

Despite the spellings, the book was entirely English. As the title page states, the pictures were ‘Reproduced from originals from the Morning Leader’. Its ferocious drawings depict scenes from British history, larded with anachronisms.

My devotion to this book – and Grandma’s copy has sailed through the storms of time to be with me to the end – must have been inspired by the sinister aspect of the characters depicted. People are forever having their eyes poked out or being poisoned. Henry I dies of a surfeit of lampreys, his agony well illustrated, while the butler looking on can barely suppress a snigger. A marvellous book indeed, calculated to nip in the bud any hope of being sentimental about the past of our glorious isle.

Grandma Wilson presided over a Victorian house. She preserved in it Victorian ways; she must have been born at about the time of the Great Exhibition. Her tastes had set in concrete, or at least gutta-percha, at that time.

Monday was a very uncomfortable day, when a puritanical purging of dirt took place. I felt in danger of purgation too. Grandma employed a fearsome washerwoman of square shoulders and square everythings who set to work with a dolly and tub to beat garments into a pulp, before stringing them up in the garden on a line like so many drowned criminals.

Everything about the house that could be elaborate was elaborate. One sat in the lavatory on a toilet encased in mahogany with a lever to one side, resembling a Jules Verne ejector seat in a giant airship. The bath, similarly encased, had a grill like a set of gnashed teeth into which water was sucked with agonised noises, like Brown Windsor soup through a moustache.

Furniture in sitting and living room was designed to intimidate. Most of it was carved wherever carving was possible, reminiscent of the Cattermole engravings in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, which my uncle Ernie used to read to me.

The flimsiest furniture was in the drawing room, where antimacassars were the rule. Expressly designed to counteract childhood was a freestanding china cabinet on spindly legs. It contained dozens of small white china souvenirs. To venture within a yard of it was to awaken cries of ‘Mind out!’, or even ‘Mind out, now!’, as though one had not minded out only the day before.

Family photo albums with dangling tassels were stowed in a revolving bookcase. A snarling fox, lifelike feat of taxidermy, stood above the door in its glass case, ever threatening small boys that it might jump out and attack them.

All light switches protruded like brass replicas of Hottentot breasts. They were tipped with little vague levers for nipples; instead of the customary brisk On-Off of normal electrical equipment, they featured a Yes-No-or-Maybe function.

A large blacklead grate dominated the breakfast room. The coals imprisoned there glowed with resentment. In the cellar, smelling of damp muslin and pulped mushrooms, hung some of the fruits of Grandma’s labours. She was an industrious little woman, an over-baker by conviction, so that she could distribute cakes, concealed beneath tea cloths, to poor relations dotted about town, in the Dogsthorpe Road and elsewhere.

I was taken with her into these cottages, which poverty had preserved in an even earlier Victorian mode than prevailed in Grandma’s house.

A particularly overpowering parlour in the Dogsthorpe Road contained huge black chairs on castors with bird’s nests of horsehair sprouting from their seats. Afraid to sit on these semi-sentient objects, I remained obstinately standing in one corner of the room. The chairs were always in such a bad mood they overpowered what conversation was to be had. I recollect only my grandmother standing there saying – it seems now over and over – ‘Oh, I am sorry, dear’ – though what about, and to whom, if not to one of the chairs, I have no idea.

She and her two sons, Allen before his marriage, and Bert, inhabited this residual Victorian world, content to all appearances. Never did I hear any of them utter a harsh word. Although they attended the Methodist church with unfailing regularity, their main concerns were with more solid things of life; waistcoats, shoes, puddings, paperknives, hairnets, spectacles, chess sets, pipes, feather beds, the behaviour of the boot boy, the arrival or otherwise of the milkman. They had no patience with infinity or any of that stuff. Was it because of a lack of imagination they were such thoroughly decent people?

Although Grandma’s house still stands in Park Road, a transformation has taken place. It has been divided into flats. We have evidence on all sides that the nuclear family is breaking up. So now presumably solitary people inhabit fragments of the family home. Perhaps they are happier, better people. Or perhaps not.

When the whooping cough abated, I was able to enjoy something of Peterborough. It was then a quiet old cathedral town, the sort of place in which the Cattermole who illustrated Barnaby Rudge would have painted happily. Planners came along in the sixties and transformed Peterborough into a New Town. But when I knew it at the age of five, stalls of live eels, trapped in the fens, were being sold in the marketplace outside the cathedral, as if in some old print.

My uncles’ offices were close by the cathedral, up three flights of stone stairs. There I examined their precise architectural drawings, laid out on special architectural paper. As in an alchemist’s den, the offices contained all kinds of instruments of unknown usage. I was quite excited, and had to be sick into a metal wastepaper container.

In the beautiful cathedral, with its noble west front, reposes the body of Catherine of Aragon. Many a year on, Margaret and I visited the queen’s birthplace in Spain, in Alcala de Henares. The uncles took me on to the roof of the cathedral. From there, on a clear day, you can make out distant Ely cathedral, another fossil of a vanished age of faith.

When Uncle Bert went about his architectural business, I often accompanied him. We ranged far beyond Peterborough, beyond Dogsthorpe, Whittlesey, Twenty Foot River and Hobbs Bridge, towards Wisbech. He took me to inspect ugly little churches he and Allen had designed. He drove me out into fenland.

Here, the Wilson partnership had designed sluices to drain the land. Water ran, it was hoped, according to an orderly scheme, through the flat lands to the Nene and thence out to the Wash.

Another of Bert’s treats was to drive us to March. March is the sort of place where the Flat Earth Society probably meets. The grand LNER railway ran through March, on its course between Liverpool Street station in London and Waverley station in Edinburgh. When the LNER was setting up speed records, the miles about March were where the recording took place. Bert and I stood at the level crossing to watch the trains rush by, straight as a die, horizon to horizon.

When The Flying Scotsman hurtled through Peterborough station on its way north, screaming its contempt for all immobile things, the station vibrated, together with everything in it. The noise seized and shook us. Such power would not be felt again until the first rockets climbed into space. I made a resolution – common to boys at the time – that when and if I grew up, I should become an engine driver on a steam locomotive.

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