The Twinkling of an Eye

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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