The Twinkling of an Eye

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.