The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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      Yeah man, yeah man, yeah man

      The school’s four houses decided to put on house concerts to celebrate end of term. As ever, my situation was uncertain. I had passed School Cert. and was supposedly to study for A Levels, in preparation for my future career. The plan was that, since H. H. Aldiss had been shot from under us, I should become an architect and join my Wilson uncles’ firm in Peterborough.

      I was inclined towards the idea. For that purpose, I had given up Latin in order to study German, because only with German went Higher Maths (the vagaries of the educational system were strange, then as now). But Higher Maths under Mr Coupland proved as far beyond me as had Lower Maths. You need the Higher stuff in order to become an architect. I coasted in that last year, and was therefore available for things more amusing than calculus.

      Like the house concert.

      Bowler was in charge of the Grenville concert, I of the Fortescue concert. With the assistance of Harold Boyer, I wrote all the sketches, poems and catches, and performed in many of them. It was my term. For once my labels, Foo, The Comedian, came fruitful. And instead of Sammy trying to destroy me, there was Boyer to encourage me, and to laugh.

      Fortescue House won the contest. Applause and congratulations. Sammy kept out of the way, smoking on his Gold Flakes in his airless study. It was my finest hour, or at least half-hour, for the nursing sister Veronica Talbot was so delighted that she invited me to her room, gave me gin to drink – and kissed me. Yes, Veronica Talbot kissed me on the lips!

      My last term at Buckland. Military service loomed. Several of our Six Formers sought for ways to escape call-up. Schemes for further study incurred exemption, if you were clever about it. I wonder how some of my friends who were clever then, and escaped war service to retreat to the sinecure of Edinburgh University or other seats of learning, feel about their strategy now. Confused I might be, but ‘dodging the column’ was never my style.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ