The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ wherever those cities were, there I wanted to be. I saw the movie Blues in the Night, which features Jimmy Lunceford, eighteen times over the years, in England and abroad. Almost as many times as Citizen Kane. As an adult, I sang the song in duet with the philosopher A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayers.

      End of term. Back to that dreary Bickington shop on the corner. And now great excitement. Following Pearl Harbor, the United States of America had entered the war. On our side. What was more, an American regiment was to be flown over to Fremington.

      Fremington was next to Bickington; one village straggled into the other along the main road. Under Dot’s guiding hand, the Bickington Women’s Institute decided to give the Americans a slap-up reception. Music and dancing would be the order of the day. There would be food and soft drinks. No alcohol, since we had heard the American forces drank – unlike, of course, our boys. Everything was made ready.

      The American regiment arrived. It was black. In those days, the US segregated its soldiery by colour.

      What a fluttering in the dovecotes! Committee meeting! A sensible decision was arrived at. Black Americans were in the war just like anyone else, and would soon have to fight in Europe. The slap-up reception must continue exactly as planned.

      So black troops poured into Bickington, and the party went ahead. It was a roaring success. The music veered from the hot—

      I’ll be round to meet you in a taxi, honey,

      Better be ready ’bout a ha’ past eight—

      to the sentimental—

      I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine

      The Bickington ladies, including Mrs McKechnie, were delighted with their own wisdom. The black Americans were charmed to find themselves in a country without any colour prejudice …

      At school, we made a discovery. Mr H. G. Wells was still alive! It amazed and cheered us. We were accustomed to reading books by dead authors; the books we studied were by the illustrious dead, from Hillard & Botting onward. But the great imaginer was living in London, a city more devastated by German bombs than by his Martians.

      I read and wrote. Most eagerly I read Astounding, in which, to my mind, the future was being born. Chicken Coupland caught me reading an issue in class. Seizing it, he tore it into small pieces, damning it for rubbish. I had been in the middle of a Theodore Sturgeon story.

      My difficulties with Sammy continued. The one master on my side was my housemaster, Harold Boyer. Harold was of mixed English-German descent, and hence presumably not allowed to serve in HM Forces. He arrived at the school in 1940 and went on to become a governor of the school and an HM Inspector of Schools.

      Harold could teach anything. His manner was somewhat theatrical. He would prowl before us, slapping one hand in the other. ‘Facts, facts, you must have facts.’ He was making reference to the School Certificate exams, which began to loom over us.

      He became head of the house I was in, and showed a genuine interest in our lives. Like Crasher Fay, he rarely if ever beat people. He was a humorous man. After I had left school I discovered just what amusing company he was. Harold then revealed a bawdy subversive streak, whereas in the form room he could resemble a one-man version of the Holy Roman Empire.

      Like the other masters, Harold shared Buckland’s general discomfort. Unmarried masters generally had rooms within the school. Harold, being married to Isabel, and having three daughters, lived in a cottage two miles away in Charles Bottom – always known as Charlie’s Arse. Sometimes we saw the dark-haired Isabel pushing a pushchair up to school; this sight caused some excitement among the sex-starved.

      Finally, our form came to the test – School Cert., later to become GCE. Although my militaristic spirit was rather more pinko than khaki, I had passed Cert. A, the OTC exam, a necessity for becoming an army officer. I was less confident about School Certificate. At that precarious stage in life, one’s whole future appeared to depend on the wretched exam. And I had not always paid the greatest attention. Was I not ‘Foo’, the demon humorist of the Middle Fifth?! (‘Foo’ was a favourite expletive used in Bill Holman’s prize surrealist comic strip, ‘Smokey Stover’.)

      Sammy did everything to make life difficult. On the morning of the first exam, tension was high. We were to proceed into the memorial hall to widely spaced desks. On the way, I dropped my inkwell. Ink splashed over the stone passage. This Sammy seized on in a fury. Here was a chance to humiliate the comedian!

      I was made to go down to the kitchens, fetch a bucket of hot water, and swab up the mess. One of the menservants could easily have done the job. As a result I entered the hall late and flustered. When I made a return visit to the school after the war, I observed a faint blue stain still marking the site of my accident: the Aldiss Memorial Blob.

      We went through the exams, playing tennis between times. A week in limbo, isolated from the rest of school and from the future. At the end of term my report reached home. Sammy wrote on the bottom of the report that I had behaved so badly I did not deserve to pass the exam.

      It was a low blow. Bill was furious. Was this all I cared for all their sacrifices? He mentioned in passing how much money he had wasted on my education. As usual, I stood before him without defence. Not for the first time I wondered why, when I admired my father so, I was mute in his presence.

      After the ticking off, he and Dot were hardly on speaking terms with me. I could not explain. Before the most patient interlocutor I could not have explained the difficulties of matching two conflicting sets of interests, education and growing up. Indeed, these difficulties remain hard to reconcile. You strive to become adult, which means rejecting the control of your elders; yet to become educated you must submit to their discipline.

      ‘Your father is really upset,’ was all Dot would say when I tried to approach her. ‘You didn’t work, did you?’ She too suffered from conflicting loyalties.

      That was always her role in our little army: the NCO between the Commanding Officer and his tiny conscripts.

      Bill and Dot were an incompatible pair. Whatever had occurred between them in the early stages of their marriage, during the wartime years and afterwards, they stood together. When things were most trying for them, at the Bickington store in particular they saw the necessity for solidarity, even at the expense of their children. However greatly they had once disappointed each other, they remained loyal and devoted. Over all, they set Betty and me a persuasive argument for marriage and its loyalties – an argument I later found myself unable to follow.

      Under the shadow of Bill’s silent disapproval, my fragile morale evaporated. Only at school had there been friends to turn to. I slipped under the ever-threatening shadow of my own disapproval. I took to climbing apple trees and falling out of them, but received only bruises rather than the desired broken neck. Even there I seemed to lack determination.

      Successes glittered occasionally amid the prevailing shades of failure. I persuaded Betty to scale the north face of the roof and enter the deserted bakery with me. We established a museum in our old disused stable, filling it with stones, fossils and sheeps’ skulls found in nearby fields.

      It was during this period that Mussolini was arrested and killed. We were treated to newsreel footage of him hanging upside down, like a pig’s carcass. How dare I make anything of my sufferings when the great world was undergoing a kind of death agony, and millions were dispossessed or dying? Who am I to cry out? No great religion has ever proposed that life is a bed of roses.

      Those СКАЧАТЬ