The Twinkling of an Eye

One period of the war he tells me about is the nightmare of a Channel crossing in a ship transporting mules to France, presumably to the British Expeditionary Force. A storm hits, the mules break loose below decks. Bill has to control them. I picture lamps swinging and blinking, hardly illuminating the dark fetid stables. Great black animals plunge in fright, showing the whites of their eyes. Amid the noise, the stamping hooves, Bill fights to keep the brutes steady.

Bill serves in Salonika. Later, he is gassed. He is sent to Egypt to recover. The dry air is considered good for his lungs. He is admitted to the 19th General Hospital in Alexandria, where he suffers from malaria. He flies with 113 Squadron in Mesopotamia.

Faded sepia photographs, kept in an old cardboard box, tell part of his story. Here he is in Luxor, among the ruins. Here he is by the Nile. Here he is in a topee, washing his socks. In most of these photographs he is perky and cheerful, as I first remember Bill – and puffing away at cigarettes. A photograph survives of him standing by an old Sopwith Something, leather flying helmet and goggles on his head, the image of Biggles, smoking.

He is involved in the Dardanelles débâcle, Gallipoli. But I cannot put a timetable together. Eventually, at the end of April 1919, he is discharged from what has become the RAF.

When approached in 1990 for details of Bill’s military career, the Ministry of Defence is helpful, but can, after so many years, produce only two brief documents. One of these documents shows that Bill is mentioned in despatches and awarded a pension of eight shillings and sixpence for seventy weeks. Presumably this is a disability pension.

Some time during the Second World War, when we live over the shop in Bickington, I discover a key which fits an old desk. Daringly, Betty and I unlock. In one drawer, to our mutual embarrassment, we discover a collection of washable condoms. In another drawer we find a document, written in Bill’s neat hand. It is an account in verse of his military career. Since he is something of an artist, he has illustrated it with sketches in pencil. We hear someone coming. Guiltily, we close the drawer.

What happened to this manuscript is a matter of guesswork. Sadly, it was not preserved.

Legend has it that when Bill’s ship bringing him back from the East docked in Southampton waters, he was so eager to get home that he dived overboard and swam ashore. He married Elizabeth May Wilson almost as soon as he had dried off.

Theirs is a modest wedding in Peterborough, with my uncle Bert as best man. It seems that even his father, H. H., on whom he so depended, was not present. Gordon, by contrast, marries in style in London.

Bill’s ill health continues. He is prevailed upon to lunch with Mother and me at a small table in their bedroom, at which, on doctor’s instructions, he drinks a bottle of Tolly’s Brown Ale every day. On the label of the bottle is a figure holding a torch aloft; perhaps it is Mercury. The novelty of this arrangement is appealing. On a Monday, it is generally mince, with triangular slices of toast.

A severe winter comes. Is this 1928? It snows at Christmas. Uncle Bert is staying with us. Bill is well enough to venture out for a walk. I am wrapped up like a small parcel. We walk into Dereham market place. All is silent under its white cover; there is no traffic. The horse trough by the war memorial is filled with a solid chunk of ice. But this is not a real memory. This is a photographed event. The film of the past has been edited.

What is real is the crunch of impacting snow under red rubber boots, the taste of air like a chilled wine, the wonderful sense of the world transformed. The knowledge that everything is miraculous can never again visit us as vividly as when we are three, and it is Christmas Day, and we are wrapped up like a small present.

But Bill coughs. It’s the gassing or the smoking, or probably both. I am frightened in the mornings by the terrible harsh noises he makes as he gets up and washes.

Poor Bill becomes unwell. In 1929, Dr Duygan says to him, ‘Stanley, if you want to survive the winter, you’d better go to a warmer climate.’

He books a passage on a liner and sails to South Africa for six months – rather a long winter.

Mother stands by the chest of drawers in their bedroom and weeps. I go to her and clutch her legs, the only part of her I can reach.

‘Don’t cry. I’ll look after you.’

It proves to be the sort of thing I am to say to women ever afterwards. Dot merely weeps harder.

She closes the flat. She takes me to stay with her mother in Peterborough. Uncle Bert is fun. Lions and tigers is our favourite game.

This is an exciting time in Peterborough. Dot’s brother Allen is getting married – rather late in life. He is to marry Nancy Perkins. I am to be their page. This responsible post is marred only by the fact that you have to wear shiny patent leather shoes with buttons.

After the ceremony, we all adjourn to Woodcock’s Restaurant, opposite the cathedral, for a wedding feast. This includes champagne. Considering that all the Wilsons are teetotal, this must represent a Perkins innovation.

Indeed, Aunt Nancy enjoys the good life. She is fun, and looks very pretty and stylish – perhaps the snappiest member of a family whose Achilles’ heel may be lack of style, at least until my sister Betty gets going. Nancy often trots up to London and buys herself a smart new dress, which we all admire. Her belief in jollity is perhaps a shade firmer than Allen’s. Of course, she is twenty years his junior.

Aunt Nancy becomes a favourite. She and uncle set up house in ‘Grendon’, which is north of Park Road, by the eponymous park. One spring, a robin nests by the latch of their side gate; the gate stands open for weeks, so that we don’t disturb it. Whenever I go to see Aunt Nancy, she puts her heels up on a chair, smokes and tells me jokes. Sometimes she tipples sherry. Later, fruit salad is served and I get all the halves of cherry.

Other important things happen while Dot and I are at Brinkdale that winter. We both get flu. Grandma worries. She remembers the great flu epidemic of 1919, when so many people who had survived the war died.

Brinkdale has its scary elements. On its upper landing, just where you have to turn the corner to go to the lavatory, hangs a sepia print of a Roman sentry in uniform, holding a spear, while behind him through a gloomy archway people are dying as flaming chunks fall from the smoky air. The sentry’s eyes roll upwards in a frightful way, as if spotting something disagreeable just behind me.

Grandma, to calm my fears, tells me that this is Poynter’s famous ‘Faithful Unto Death’. The doomy title does little to cheer me.

I must say something of that kindly and frail-looking person, my maternal grandmother.

Sarah Elizabeth Wilson is about fifty when Dot and her small boy stay with her in the winter of 1929. She is long past the climacteric when, in the eyes of small boys, people cease to be People and become a different species, the Old. It’s the difference between the frisky Atlantic and the Dead Sea.

Grandma wears elaborate widow’s weeds, and has never been out of them since her husband died. Her black dress is decorated with black beads and reaches to the floor. A frilled white collar fits tightly about her neck, much as Anne Boleyn might have worn when approaching the block.

Her face is almost fleshless, certainly colourless. Her grey hair is swept back and controlled by a velvet arrangement. She is a serious person. I am never able to warm to her. For this, I condemn myself. She is kind and patient. She will later play endless games of halma with me. And yet. Perhaps it’s the smell of lavender and mothballs …

Grandma has it good. For her, none of the struggle to live and keep heads above water which the rest of us experience. She has a cook and a maid and a mobcapped washerwoman with sharp elbows and a boot boy to help her. They all have their separate nooks in the rear of the house. Being a farmer’s daughter, Grandma is also an expert cook. Succulent home-cured hams, tremendous Christmas puddings and other delicacies hang in muslin like silkworm cocoons from the rafters of the cellar.

On her generous table are items of silver, cleaned once a week by the maid. There is a sugar sifter of particular fascination. She eats Grape Nuts for her breakfast, and takes the Daily Graphic, which she reads after breakfast. In the Graphic’s pages, I follow the adventures of Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, and Squeak’s villainous uncle, Whifskoffski, who carries a round and smouldering bomb in his pocket, and is my favourite character. Whifskoffski is an old grey penguin and, though I know it not, a comment on the extraordinary events taking place in the Soviet Union.

When Grandma is ill, nurses march in, starched and proper, to sit by her bedside and command everyone with their Midland accents. She has a large family to worry about her every cough and sneeze. When she is well, there by her side is her faithful and jolly son Bert to escort her to the car, wrap her securely in a rug, and drive her about the countryside. She is never pushed from the stage of life by a younger generation. She remains always in control – though during World War II she once consents, but once only, to hide from German bombers under her solid kitchen table.

Dot and her son spend Christmas of 1929 at Brinkdale. All that remains of that occasion (but what a wonder that anything remains!) is a little Christmas tree in the back room, the drawing room, and the present of a drum. A bright tin drum, which the little drummer boy belabours exuberantly with two wooden drumsticks until he drives all concerned mad and is forbidden to play with it.

On one occasion Uncle Bert drives us to Milton Common, outside Peterborough. The uncles always tried to keep us amused. They throw away their dignity for the sake of a joke. No wonder we adore them – and behave ridiculously in return.

On Milton Common I find a small branch from which the bark has been stripped; it gleams white; I tell everyone I have found a mammoth tusk. Uncle Bert pretends to believe me.

We are there because the sun is about to go into total eclipse. We stand in the open, waiting. Gradually, a hole is bitten in the blazing buttock of the sun.

We drop our tusk.

The bite grows bigger. And now a mighty shadow gallops across the open ground towards us. We are swept up in it, as by a chilly tsunami. An eerie silence falls. Everyone is transfixed.

Then, in a minute, silver bursts forth on the right-hand side of the black disc. The sun is winning its struggle. Birds begin to sing again. Normality, swiftly returning, seems a disappointment. We walk back to Grandma Wilson, who has remained in the car, snug under her rug.

Eclipse or no eclipse, Grandma’s life is governed by pleasant routine. She walks down to the shops once a week, to Ross the Grocer and elsewhere, where she is received by men in clean white aprons, who listen reverently to her order as if to the Nunc Dimittis, and despatch her wants by errand boy that very afternoon.

Bill returns from South Africa with photographs of Table Mountain and is in better health.

Bill and Dot resume their life above the shop. Business occupies his mind. He must make it up to The Guv’ner for having been away. In the evenings, he and his wife sit by the coal fire talking business. Their faces are grave. They talk in the code of the shop.

Suppose we buy double K yards of it at U cis DX. With a mark up of B plus we can reckon on A cis BA, maybe, let’s see, A dat double C …

I hate this whispering, hate this code. It excludes me. Later, I take to Kafka like a duck to water. For the time being, I play with my Lotts’ Bricks and first Meccano set. I build a house for Uncle Bert to live in.

Bill has a repertoire of tricks with which to amuse me at table. He sticks his napkin ring into his eye socket for a monocle and adopts a highfalutin’ voice. When he jokes, I am happy and think how wonderful he is.

Shortly after Bill’s return, in the spring of 1930, I am standing in our living room in the sunshine. The door is open on to the flat roof, built over Father’s offices in the shop. It is announced on the wireless that a new planet has been discovered. The name of the astronomer involved is Clyde Tombaugh. The planet is to be called Pluto. It is the outermost planet of the solar system, and conditions there are bound to be pretty cold and dark.

I am thrilled. Though I would not have put it in such terms at the time, it is an extension of our imaginations. A whole extra new world that no one knew about. And how long had it been there …?

Not so very much later, I am reading books by. Sir James Jeans. Who, in 1931, could resist a book with the title The Stars in their Courses? Jeans speaks of Pluto as being ‘so far out in space that its journey round the sun takes about 250 years to complete, and so far removed from the sun’s light and heat that in all probability not only all its water but also its atmosphere, if it has one, must be frozen solid.’

Frozen solid. Its atmosphere …

Gosh, I’d love to go there!

Like all good astronomers, Jeans deals with time as well as space. Near the end of his book is another reflection that extends the imagination: ‘We realise that we are, in all probability, at the very beginning of the life of our race; we are still only at the dawn of a day of almost unthinkable length.’

I told an interviewer recently how greatly the discovery of Pluto excited me. She said, ‘But you were not five years old …’

But before schools and jobs are inflicted upon us, the universe is ours.

As related in Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, I was early subject to strange ontological dreams. More than once, I dreamed I had been a great wizard in a previous existence, perhaps in France. I had been burnt at the stake for my beliefs. Sometimes the stake with me lashed to it would crash into the blaze. I would awaken screaming. Mother would bound across the passage from her room to comfort me.

There are other dreams of falling, to be accounted for only years later.

We are now coming towards the September of 1930, when I am given a new pullover and sent to my first school. The Five Year Abyss lies over the horizon, rumbling closer.

For school I am well prepared. I can read and write. The two abilities are almost synonymous. They are greatly encouraged by Dot, who assists my reading by the making of little books. My first stumbling adventures in the alphabet are taken up with my crude drawings and bound together. The books are covered with pieces of wallpaper, cut to size, remnants from the furnishing shop.

At the age of four or five, I am on good terms with the tracklements of the main meat dish of writing: the pens, scissors, pictures, rulers, bindings, and above all the white paper.

How I love these little books! Dot is in a good mood and does not sigh too much when we sit together at this occupation at the dining-room table. She finds me a ready pupil. The books get bigger and more eloquent. Crayons are used. I win another prize.

So school comes round.

It’s not too far. I walk from the flat through the market place, past a haunted house, which stands empty at the top of Swaffham Hill, and up Quebec Street to Miss Mason’s Kindergarten. On the way, we play conkers or marbles or tag or anything. Someone has a slowworm in his pocket. He scares the girls with it.

Miss Mason is tall and severe, with red cheeks on which capillaries map the delta of the Nile. She is assisted by two other teachers. One is a fat panting lady, who comes to school with an ugly little pug dog, and has to have an inflatable cushion on which to sit in class. Her name, suitably enough, is Miss Payne. The other teacher is a trim and elegant lady who wears tweeds and has pearls in her earlobes to denote her superiority. Her name is Miss Ida Precious. I would learn Higher Calculus for Miss Precious. She never takes the remotest notice of me. I think to myself, Better that way.

We have French lessons almost at once. C H A T. CAT. With a picture of a cat, just to make sure. The two words are similar. No problems so far. We’re in deeper water when they try to tell us that C H I E N means DOG. On the face of it, the idea seems unreasonable. Education entails learning a number of unreasonable things.

We chant our multiplication tables as if they were psalms. Twice two are four, twice three are six. Only when you get to the seven times table do you start to wonder if teachers really know what they’re about.

It is in one of the breaks that Margaret Trout is dramatically sick, thus shattering our engagement. The promise to love someone for ever rests on the understanding that they will remain forever loveable.

There are other attractions in the playground. It is easy to tell girls from boys; they are the ones who tend to kick you less. Some are also beautiful. I am fond of one whose name has disappeared down the rabbit hole of time; she has short dark hair and wears a mustard-coloured cord dress. She is quiet and has a half-smile. She lives in the country, Toftwood probably. Jammed with me behind a sheltering water butt, she lets me look up that mustard-coloured skirt. Oh, the days when we ask – and receive!

As it must have done to a greater degree to parents born in Victorian days, it seems extraordinary now to recall how much sex goes on in Miss Mason’s playground. It was purely pleasurable, without guilt, the sort of playfulness one imagines Gauguin hoped to find when he arrived in the favoured isles of Melanesia.

One game is called Cows and Milkmaids. The boys are cows. They line up and the milkmaids come along and ‘milk’ them. It’s a colossal hit! Everyone loves it, except for little Clara Cream, who is regarded as too objectionable to be permitted to play. The cows moo with delight, the milkmaids work away. Scrunch scrunch scrunch in the trousers.

So enraptured am I with Cows and Milkmaids that, eager to share, I tell Dot about it. Dot flies into a morality fit. Horror is not the word. Sex is a bit of a sore point with her. She bids me sit perfectly still and not move. She phones Miss Mason. It is not enough. She dons coat, cashmere scarf and hat, and goes off to confront the lady personally.

I have no idea what the fuss is about. Which does not stop me feeling an uneasy and all-pervasive guilt.

What have I done? How frequently children must ask themselves that.

Just supposing Dot tells Miss Rowlingson …

So the game of Cows and Milkmaids is stopped. The interest remains. We were only exercising a natural curiosity in each other’s bodies. It’s a curiosity that lasts throughout life, and powers much of our art.

When I graduate to Miss Mason’s upstairs room – but this episode is on the far side of the Five Year Abyss – a gorgeous girl called Rosemary locks the door, tears off all her clothes, and dances naked upon the central table. We stand there enthralled, gazing upward. Rosemary is celebrating the attainment of puberty. Dark hair curls on her body, a special little wilderness among the barren slopes of her thighs. For days we beg her to do it again, but there is only that one performance. Perhaps someone else was fool enough to confide in their parents.

Every morning, as I set off for school, Dot comes to the flat door with me to see me on my way. This is what she says:

‘I may not be here when you come back.’

Perhaps she feels that this phraseology is insufficiently precise. Then she will say something even more dreadful as she gives a final tug to straighten my cap. The words are for my ears only; no one else hears what she says. What she tells me is the most dreadful thing anyone has ever said, though perhaps I will become accustomed to it when it is repeated.

‘I may be dead when you come back.’

After school, I drag my heels down Quebec Road, linger in the market place, in two minds about going home, about ringing the bell, about seeing if anyone answers. The steel-engraving angel is heavy at my shoulder.

I call the premises of H. H. Aldiss a paradise. So I was to think of it for many and many a year when we were exiled from it. But there is no earthly paradise; the Revd Edna Rowlingson was right there. Moments of beatitude certainly, but no long continuance.

If Bill is unwell, Dot also has her suffering, and much of this she passes on to her son. Something weighs upon her spirit. Winter depresses her, first spring flowers – the snowdrops, modestly hanging heads – elate her. She sighs and repeats that she wishes she were as free as a bird.

Worse, she would pretend to weep if I did something wrong. Why could I not be more like that dear dead little sister of mine?

What are little boys made of?

Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—

That’s what little boys are made of

Her weeping, hand shading eyes so that face could not be seen, is a convincing performance. Only when Betty comes along is there someone robustly to reject this pantomime, this hypocrisy.

Worse still, Dot has a way of governing me. She has a threat far worse than Bill’s thrashings. When I misbehave, she delivers the threat.

‘I shan’t love you any more if you do that.’

This poison, too, she must have felt, lacked some precision. She developed a variant which I found more lethal.

‘If you do that again, I shall run away and leave you.’

I have lapsed into a past tense. The film of childhood is breaking down. Time is on its destructive course.

When these threats are issued, I am made ill. I am a robust and jolly little boy, rarely sick. However, I have what Dot calls ‘bilious attacks’. Dr Duygan is summoned, with his old black bag. He can find nothing physically wrong. The attacks are a mystery, to me as much as anyone else.

The attacks earn me a groat of gratitude: I am always sick into the lavatory bowl. Not a drop is spilt elsewhere. It shows commendable control.

Decades later, as a grown man, I face a similar crisis, and yield up a similar response. So I perceive the true nature of those puzzling childish attacks. They are a nervous response to Dot’s threats; attempts to spew out the poisons she pours into my mind. They are not ‘bilious attacks’. They are violent physical responses to emotional attacks.

My agony of mind is great. I resolve that if things become too bad, I will go down to the shop and tell Bill. He will make Dot stop. He will understand I cannot help being bad. But I never put it to the test.

I take to running from the house. I hide in the shop. I climb trees. I trot about Dereham streets. After dark one evening, I am run over by a bike. The man dismounts and calls anxiously. But I rush limping away, hiding in an alley until I’m better. I go home with dirty clothes. Dot is plaintive when she sees the mud.

This time she really will leave me if I continue to be naughty.

She adds details. She will run away up Norwich Street and never come back.

I go into the lavatory and throw up. Yet another ‘bilious attack’.

It is convenient that I now go to school. It gives Dot more time alone. Bill works downstairs in the shop, coughing his dry cough.

Dot takes it easy upstairs. She is pregnant.

I have no knowledge of this aspect of the universe, which later will interest me greatly. I do not realise that Dot is growing larger. I can summon no recollection of her sorrows and sufferings during those months.

What remains in mind is that I am induced to kneel by her side and pray with her every evening.

Dear God, you know how I suffer. This time, this time, please let it be a girl.

I kneel by her side, hands clasped together, eyes tight closed, less than the dust. I know I am her mistake.

1931 dawns. I am still taking the Rainbow and following the exploits of Mrs Bruin’s Boys, but my mental horizons are widening. Dot likes to be driven by one of the staff to Norwich. She takes me with her for company, so that she can keep an eye on me. She likes to lunch in a restaurant overlooking the market square.