The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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       4

       The Old Business

      The burden of the long gone years: the weight,

      The lifeless weight, of miserable things

      Done long ago, not done with: the live stings

      Left by old joys, follies provoking fate,

      Showing their sad side, when it is too late …

      Lionel Johnson

       Experience

      A time of war is comparatively easy to describe. One’s personal details can be crosschecked against grand external events. And an adult memory, working on adult time, has filed away its record, for good or ill. But to return to childhood, to the Permian mud of infancy, is to enter a more questionable area. We may see certain distant events with clarity. But on either side of the event, fogs roll in. And were those events in fact the events as they are ‘clearly remembered’?

      My uncomfortable advantage is that I see – believe I see – much of my first five years of life with clarity. For when I am five years old, something happens to me resembling the fall of a guillotine blade, severing past from future.

      Those early formative years can roll like a film and are as untrustworthy as a movie, however sincerely truth is attempted, for the movie has been edited by time.

      It is mid-August, two o’clock of a summer’s morning. The newborn infant lies in its cot in that eternal present tense preserved in memory. It is a boy, with the slight blemish of a port wine mark on its forehead. It will be christened Brian Wilson Aldiss, thus bearing the names of both sides of the family. It cries a little.

      It is born at home, in its parents’ bedroom. Its mother lies exhausted, a nurse hovering over her. She also cries. She had hoped for a baby girl.

      The boy is a disappointment, and will be made to feel that keenly. It lies listening to its mother’s muffled sobs. The curtain of its life goes up; but, as in an Ibsen play, there is already a terrible past history awaiting revelation. One day, someone will knock at the door and then the whole charade of normality will fall apart.

      Already deception is brewing like a thunder cloud about the infant. The deception will masquerade as truth for many years, and devour tissue like a cancer. The mother, almost without willing it, is brooding on a consoling fantasy which will survive undetected for sixty years, and accumulate a burden of anguish meanwhile.

      This is the story of how, for much of that time, I was not so much living as being entangled with life.

      Such is often the case with first-borns: but should I count myself a first- or second-born? For sixty years, that too remained a puzzle. No wonder the infant cried a little!

      The name of the mother sobbing comfortably in her feather bed is Elizabeth May Aldiss, née Wilson, generally known as Dot. She is married to Stanley Aldiss, generally known as Bill. Bill and Dot always address each other by these invented names.

      Something of their history is in order before the camera of memory turns its lens towards the newcomer in its cot.

      The sepia deepens as we sink back into the late nineteenth century.

      Dot is born in Peterborough, on 1 June 1884, the fourth child of Elizabeth and Allen Wilson, the other three children being boys.

      The Wilsons are a jolly lot. Their origins are humble, but Allen has one great advantage to set against his ‘lack of background’, as people used to say. He has great charm of character. Unlike many charmers, he is industrious. He becomes a builder and rises out of poverty. A. W.’s and Sarah Elizabeth’s four children largely inherit these pleasing traits. In order of seniority – the children are christened Allen, Herbert (Bert), Ernest and Elizabeth May. Elizabeth May is doted on by all the family, the family’s dear little spoilt girl.

      Although the film is blurred, we perceive that the Edwardian period is good for the Wilsons. The family moves to a bigger house, a solid semi-detached in a respectable street, which A. W. has built. My grandfather, prospering, never works after lunch at this time. He smokes cigars or plays billiards. He now owns four houses in Park Road, and becomes secretary to the active Baptist Church at the bottom of the street. He breeds pigeons; pigeons of all kinds and colours, pigeons with puffed-out breasts, pigeons with none.

      Allen Woodward Wilson Esq. becomes President of the All England Pigeon Fanciers Association. After his humble beginnings, he is happy to feel himself to be a man of some substance. On the occasions when he goes away on business, A. W. wears a top СКАЧАТЬ