The Twinkling of an Eye

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.