The Twinkling of an Eye

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.