Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

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      The vicar’s name was Winterton. He had two sons, who came to St Paul’s at reduced rates. They were badly bullied at first. We chased them round and round the field and eventually buried them head first in a huge pile of grass clippings. Next term, they returned with avenging fury. Their father had been talking to them. Both were small. But they set upon us with sticks and terrified us. From then on, they drove us round the field at whim.

      While the garden was one consolation, the library was another. Library was the name of the bookshelves behind the door of our classroom – it was more than a classroom, being the room in which we were trapped when we were not in the dormitory or exiled to the field. The misery of being back in that room for another term was stifled by being able to pick out The Captives of the Sea (or was it The Prisoners of the Sea?) and commence a re-reading. The story was sub-Dumas. I read it at the start of every term I was at St Paul’s.

      Learning to be a gentleman is not something I recommend unless one has a natural bent for it. It included standing in an embarrassed line and singing such catches as ‘My Dame Hath a Lame Tame Crane’ and soppy songs like ‘The Ash Grove,’ ‘Fare Thee Well for I Must Leave Thee,’ ‘The Golden Vanity,’ ‘Cherry Ripe,’ and ‘The Keel Row,’ the words of which we copied into exercise books.

      The gentlemanly arts also included football and cricket. Football was all right. Cricket was less satisfactory. With a maximum of twenty players, we could at best play with no more than ten a side. Despite which our parents had to provide us with full cricketing gear – white ducks and shirts, sweaters, caps, cricket boots. The worst ordeal of all was when Fangby decided that a St Paul’s team should play a local lads’ eleven.

      To make it an event, lemonade was provided before play and between innings. We had to take the glasses round to the local lads. How they leered! Our ages ranged from seven to eleven or twelve, theirs from twelve to seventeen. They towered above us. They wore any old dress. The lad from the garage came in his overalls.

      The match was a complete disaster. We sneered because they did not take up proper batting positions, whereas we, in our turn at the wicket, came up properly and asked for ‘Middle-and-leg.’ They batted first, and knocked us all round the field. But we had two good bowlers in Tom and Roger. Since the local lads were carelessly confident, they were vulnerable, and we got them all out for seventy-nine.

      After a further round of humiliating lemonades, we went in to bat. The local lads closed in round us like a wall, smirking. The garage lad in his overalls took the bowling and was devastatingly violent. Nothing, of course, compared with the publican’s son who bowled from the other end. They made mincemeat of us. We were all out, wounded, for nine. But at least we were properly dressed.

      One form of sport I took as an Extra. That Extra got me away from the school grounds once a week. It was generous of my father to pay for the Extra. Perhaps he felt for me in that captivity. At all events, every Monday I was allowed to walk unescorted down the road to a gentleman called Mr Field, who taught me riding.

      Mr Field was a cheerful red-faced man. I liked him better than his horses. Nevertheless, as the lessons progressed, even the horses became less stupid. Then we would trot down Archibald Road on the spectacular beach which curved all the way round to Happisburgh and beyond, with never a soul on it. There we would gallop along in the foam, with the sun dazzling and the wind roaring in the ears. On, on, with a world uncluttered – indeed, about to dissolve into speed and light.

      Unfortunately, the riding lessons did not last many terms. They stopped and no reasons were given. Maybe it was something I said.

      One voluntary sport we endured was swimming. We learnt in geography lessons about the vernal equinox; it was, in Mr Fangby’s mind, the day on which swimming in the North Sea commenced. The North Sea throughout most of its career is a grey untrustworthy mass of chilled fluid, in which such alien entities as seaweed, shrimps, and jelly fish somehow contrive to make a living. It is not the natural element for boys of tender age – unless, of course, they are destined to become gentlemen.

      On good days, the waves of the North Sea at Bacton, as they cast themselves in desperation on the shore, are not particularly large. But to a child of eight, not long accustomed to thinking of himself as a being apart from his teddy-bear, they are enormous. As you approach them, together with a dozen other blue-limbed disconsolates, they appear to open their mouths, display their sandy throats, and prepare to devour you.

      If we did not enter this man-devouring medium with an affectation of eagerness, we were pushed or thrown in. This was not a job for Mr Fangby – whose porpoise-like form had an unporpoise-like aversion to water – but for the assistant master, Mr Noland. The logic of the operation was simple: one swam to avoid a watery grave. Those who pretended to drown were punished.

      Despite the regime of starvation and ordeal-by-ocean, I do not recall anyone being ill at St Paul’s. There was none of this namby-pamby Jane Eyre stuff of dying of consumption. That would have been frowned upon.

      Winters were harder to get through than summers. The greatest deprivation was loss of toys. Bullying and fighting remained as recreation, but I developed alternatives of my own.

      One was the making of mazes. Throughout my three years’ incarceration at St Paul’s, my mazes became bigger and more elaborate. To be caught in one of them was to wander for hours in a tedium of bafflement. Yet they were popular, possibly because that tedium, volunteered upon, was preferable to the larger tedium which contained us.

      I also made books. These were mainly notebooks with shiny red covers, bought from Miss Abigail for three-ha’pence. I stuck pictures in them, or wrote stories about enormous square machines which took people to the Moon, to their profit. A treasured microscope was permitted at school, since it was ‘scientific’; happy hours were spent poring down its tube, sketching things twitching in a drop of pond water or wild-life moving on someone’s hair. These sketches went into books.

      A rival to the popularity of the microscope by day was the kaleidoscope by night. I smuggled a small pocket kaleidoscope back to St Paul’s, and a torch. Homesickness was worst at night. It could be conquered by snuggling down into the bed and shining the torch up the kaleidoscope. Hours were spent over long winter nights, watching the tumbling patterns of colour. The pattern never repeated, one’s eye never wearied.

      We also traded cigarette cards. More esoteric were the adhesive pictures to be collected from penny bars of Nestlé’s milk chocolate. These were divided into various categories, such as birds (a bit boring), machines (good), famous explorers (okay, especially Mungo Park, because of his funny name), and prehistoric monsters (best of all). Another point of interest was that Nestlé’s – presumably in the cause of a rapidly disintegrating world peace – printed the text in English and Esperanto.

      Several of us were interested in the idea of Esperanto. Latin was boring, because dead, but Esperanto was of the present, an invented language. For a penny, one could buy a special Nestlé’s album in which to stick the pictures. There was more Esperanto. We set ourselves to learn it. Progress was rapid on some fronts, since the Esperanto for Brontosaurus is Brontosauro.

      A child’s world in the thirties was not knee-deep in dinosaurs, as is the world of the enviable child today. How can any child be miserable when Hanna-Barbera throws the beasts at you in full animation almost every week-day and twice on Sundays? Time was when you had to hunt to turn up a dinosaur in black-and-white. I slowly acquired works of reference. Particularly valued was A Treasury of Knowledge, which my father had from the Daily Mail by clipping out coupons.

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