The Twinkling of an Eye

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.