The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss
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Название: The Twinkling of an Eye
Автор: Brian Aldiss
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007482597
isbn:
Like a Communist state a parvo, H. H. Aldiss will look after you from cradle to grave.
By the rear gates, we come on one last place to explore. A narrow exterior flight of stairs leads up into the top floor of the Factory. Here is a series of small wooden rooms in which the tailors live. Some sit cross-legged on a low bench. They mark their suitings with soapy triangular pieces of chalk.
These men are miserable. One is crippled. They do not wish to talk. They work long hours in poor light. It is too late to speculate upon their home life.
Everything in H.H.’s domain connects with something else. There is an escape route from the tailors into the Factory proper. The Factory is the major storehouse for all manner of items. A whole floor is given over to rolls of linoleum. They stand solemnly together in a leafless lifeless forest. The carpeting forest is more amenable. On the ground floor is a coconut matting forest, a very hairy forest, inhospitable to juvenile life. Yet in the middle of it is a secret nook, a hidey-hole among the prickly orange trunks. Here I take Margaret Trout, whose father shaves H. H.’s cheeks every morning. When we are snugly concealed, I kiss her.
She sits tight. I propose marriage to her. She agrees. The union is sealed with a toffee. Much mockery from Dot and Bill when they hear about it (from someone else, not from me; even at that early age, I know how to keep my affairs to myself). But that event is on the other side of the great Five Year Abyss. The engagement is broken off when I witness Margaret Trout being violently sick at school, just outside the front door, by the holly tree.
Another picture from this time. It illustrates a serial story in the children’s department of our daily newspaper The picture shows a small boy sitting by the hut where he lives. The sun shines brightly. He forms the shadow of his two hands into the silhouette of a duck. Unfortunately, the duck flies away. Thus, the boy loses his shadow. Losing one’s shadow is like the loss of one’s reflection, as happens in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and elsewhere. It is equated with losing one’s soul.
The boy travels the world in search of his shadow, to find it eventually in China.
The picture holds a grand mystery for me. I colour it, and wish to go to China myself. From then on, China becomes a permanent flavour in the stews of my interior thought. Impossible though it would have seemed to Bill and Dot, their son will in time mingle with Chinese people, and will go to China. He will wonder if that story was the first step along the way.
Now we have come to the end of our tour of The Guv’ner’s domains, except for the furnishing shop. The furnishing shop has staff doors opening on to the central yard, though its customers’ arcade and entrance is on the High Street. This is Gordon’s province and boys are unwelcome here.
We say nothing of what goes on underground. Two stokeholds feed the central heating of the various parts of the shops. Ferocious men shovel coal into boilers. Here, too, boys are unwelcome, in case they catch fire.
This great various place, the property of my grandfather, H. H. Aldiss, is where I passed my first five years of life, imbibing all its joys and terrors. It remains vivid to me, a complete little bubble of existence. To be exiled from it was to experience a burden of inexpressible loss. Of that loss I could speak to no one.
The tale of East Dereham cannot be understood without glancing occasionally at the wider backcloth of English history which commenced in time out of mind, and is still in the weaving.
Noel Boston & Eric Purdy
Dereham, the Biography of a Country Town
East Dereham is a peaceful place. Sleepy, some might say. It is a small market town, of some importance in the district. In the twenties and thirties, the cattle market was much alive. The bellowing of ill-treated animals filled the town every Friday.
When I was bustling through it with hoop and top, Dereham still had about its chops the brown gravy stains of the Victorian era. The High Street was illuminated by gas. As night fell, the lamplighter trudged along with his hooked pole, to catch one of the two rings on the gas jet which, when pulled, lit the mantle. The pallid gaslight was like an apparition: ghastly the faces of all who passed beneath.
The magnificent George Borrow, who was born in Dumpling Green, speaks of East Dereham as a ‘dear little place’. It is also a place with its share of horrors. Opposite the façade of H. H. Aldiss’s emporium, two shops stand on either side of the corner of Norwich Street. One is a butcher’s shop, run by Charlie Bayfield (admired and scorned by Bill in equal amounts); often drunk. On the other corner is a grocer, Kingston & Hurn, much frequented by Dot.
Just up from Bayfield’s is Fanthorpe’s music shop, where The Guv’ner buys me a wind-up gramophone for my sixth birthday. The gramophone comes with six records (‘Impressions on a One-String Phone Fiddle’, etc.). Beyond Fanthorpe’s stand the huge double wooden gates to Bayfield’s slaughterhouse. I watch as cattle are driven – whacked – down Norwich Street towards the gates of hell. Men shout at the animals. Although I am repeatedly told that cows never suspect what is about to happen to them, I remain un-reassured.
In they go, poor beasts, hooves slipping on greasy cobbles in their haste. They are forced inside the abattoir. The doors close behind them. Bellowings are heard. Scuffles. Thuds. Silence. All is over. Then blood begins to flow in a torrent beneath the double gates into Norwich Street. A red stream, a tide carrying pieces of straw with it, rushes in the gutter towards our shop. It disappears into a drain outside Charlie Bayfield’s sawdusty door.
Again a sense of incredulity. Could that stream be poured back into the cows, to make them live again?
Dot takes me and Gyp shopping. We meet someone Dot knows. The two women are immensely friendly. As they stand chatting, I bask in all the benevolence flowing between them. Dot is happy for once. This is how life should be. They part, seemingly with reluctance. Directly the other woman has gone, Dot is vicious.
‘Oh, how I hate that woman. What a hypocrite and liar she is, what a snake in the grass!’ So Dot cannot be trusted. Appearances deceive.
You cannot distinguish between adults telling the truth and adults lying. I do my best to faint. No luck.
Dot is friendly – or she pretends to be – with Nellie Hurn. She often takes me through the pleasant-smelling grocery shop, through a mirrored door, into Hurn’s private hall. Nellie, like us, lives upstairs. The stairs are dark. Everywhere is stained brown, adding to the darkness. I enjoy the thrillingness of this, and kick the brass stair rods that hold the stair carpet in place as we go up. Dot reproves me. She calls ‘Coo-ee!’ as we ascend. Comes a faint answering cry.
Nellie Hurn lives in the front room, which is entered through a bead curtain. It is like coming suddenly on the Orient. The beads hang there, multicoloured rain suspended in mid-fall. They are strange, confusing, as we push through them. Inside a dark room sits Nellie – sits or rather reclines in an adjustable chair. Nellie is pale from playing too much patience at a round brass Benares table. She smokes a black paper cigarette while gazing frequently out of the window.
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