The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ else I know at that time. Not comfortable, with the seedy brown-sugar comfort of the Exchange Cinema, rather echoing voids and dumb surfaces, the solidity of pillars either being or resembling marble. The pulpit, into which our little reverend climbs to preach to us, is of the stoniest stone.

      Miss Rowlingson is not shy. She speaks forthrightly, never forgetting she has children in her audience. All the same, we children are sinners like the rest of the congregation. Hell fire awaits us too. Oh, she’s convincing, with that terrible inarguable faith also resembling marble. For years and years to come, I shall wonder, Is it true? The first lie, the first wank, the first shag in Calcutta: Is it true about hell fire? Am I to suffer eternal damnation?

      To capture the attention of her congregation, the Revd Rowlingson leads into her terrible themes with the beginnings of an interesting story. She might open the sermon by saying, ‘Last week, I decided to go into the country. I was walking in the fields near Swanton Morley, when suddenly I saw I was in a meadow with a large bull. The bull began to approach me from the far side of the field at an increasing pace. Temptation is rather like that bull …’ We are back with damnation, which may gore us at any moment.

      A scarcely audible sigh of disappointment escapes the children in the congregation. There are three characters in this fragment of story, the person, the bull, and God. Of these three, God is the least interesting. We don’t know what the person and the bull may do, but God has made his position perfectly plain.

      The bull has more options than God. He can charge at Edna and toss her, he can charge and funk it at the last moment, or he can simply walk about looking slightly down in the mouth, in the manner of English bulls.

      It’s the person who has the most options. She or he can walk stealthily away in the direction of the gate; or they can run like billyo for the gate; or they can try jumping over the hedge; or they can stand their ground and address the bull courteously, as the man did with the lion in the fairy story, hoping the bull will turn away, unable to think of an answer; or they can quickly build a china shop in the field, whereupon the bull will pass into it.

      Pondering such questions, I find the sermon passing pleasantly. For those expert with the divining rod, here may be divined the seed of my science fictional habit. I have always preferred to write about people than about bulls and other alien creatures.

      Hymns with repetitive lines or meaningless words like ‘Hallelujah!’ are most boring. I like the ones with geographical reference. ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains/From India’s coral strand …’ Even better, ‘Before the hills in order stood/Or Earth received her frame …’ What a vision that conjures up. I imagine the world as a jumbled mess, swept by enormous waves.

      At home, religious references are frequent, although often used sarcastically. If one sulks or asks for sympathy, Bill is always ready to intone, ‘The noble army of martyrs …’ On rising from bed, he greets rainy days with ‘Hail, smiling morn!’ Dot enjoys a misquote: ‘Just as I am, without one flea’. (We are rural; fleas are not unknown.)

      The church has its claims upon us. One claim is particularly life-threatening. Visiting pastors come to stay with us over the weekends; we are so conveniently near the Cowper Memorial Church; or perhaps Bill is low man on the Aldiss totem pole. They visit; we house them.

      The visits of pastors need much preparation. Dot and Diddy, our favourite maid, are in the kitchen by Thursday, wondering what they should cook for the weekend. How fussy is he? They work on the assumption he will be pretty fussy, and are often right. By Saturday morning, Dot makes a house search. As a religious family, we are forbidden packs of cards, ‘The Devil’s picture book’, and all that. But there are incriminating signs of our lack of genuine holiness which must be concealed.

      The Radio Times, the paper containing lists of the week’s wireless programmes, is contained in a sort of stiff fabric jacket, on which Dot has embroidered marigolds. It must go. Far too worldly. My toys must be hidden away. Only Noah’s Ark, my beautiful shining Noah’s Ark, may remain, in view of its exonerating connection with the Old Testament.

      What gets hidden under the sofa cushions is the Passing Show, a weekly family magazine. The contents might include a new way to cook a cake, how to make a perfect dovetail joint, an article on a celebrity such as Gordon Richards, the jockey, or Sir Malcolm Campbell, the world’s land speed record holder, readers’ letters, a short story, a cartoon strip and a serial. The serials include two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus stories.

      These serials are illustrated by an artist called Fortunino Matania, whose individual style tends towards the female breast. For all I know, his real name is Joe Smith. The Italian name licenses him to give vent to tits at a time when they are still suppressed.

      It is tits the visiting pastors cannot abide. So Passing Show goes under the sofa cushions.

      Sometimes the pastors prove to have more whimsy than Wesley in them. Come Saturday evening, they have settled in, and sit companionably round the fire with the parents. The atmosphere becomes a little less stiff. The preacher ventures a joke. Perhaps he ventures to ask if Mrs Aldiss would be greatly offended if he smoked a pipe.

      Why, no. Of course. Yes. Do. By all means. She will fetch him an ashtray.

      And would he by any chance like a little something with his pipe?

      Well …

      Well, it happens we have some elderberry wine in the cupboard. Home-made, of course. Bill finds a little sip now and again is good for him.

      Well. If you’re going to have one … I don’t mind if I do, Mrs Aldiss.

      Please call me Dot.

      The Lord has spoken against all alcoholic drink but, in His mercy, has made an exception for home-made elderberry wine. The berries come from the tree in the garden under which the Red Indians lurk.

      All this delicacy, this hesitation, these taboos, may sound amusing to a later generation. No funnier than violence on the streets and hooliganism at sport and aggressive coarse language today is going to sound to the citizens of AD 2050. Nothing is really funny about the life of past generations: they had their problems and their pleasures, as we do today. It is simply that the problems in small particulars are different.

      The caution not to offend, the delicacy over drink, the hospitality my parents offered (under whatever social pressure), the prurience over the innocuous Radio Times, even the dedication of these men who came and preached week after week – all that was how it was in 1930 in East Dereham. Yes, I am amused now; but that is my entitlement because I lived through it. And through it all runs something tender, a sort of unguarded wish to be better, kinder, decent, God-fearing – virtue as well as hypocrisy.

      Poor Bill and Dot, how greatly they care, how greatly they are bound to the mores of time and place, as we all continue to be. For the Zeitgeist largely glides snake-like through our mortal lives, sloughing a skin now and again. And how greatly one of them at least rejoices when it befalls that they are exiled from this small town where the mores are particularly exacting.

      But that crisis lies on the far side of the Five Year Abyss.

      The Passing Show, with its pleasing title, lies on the far side of another gulf, the World War II Abyss. Its day is done. There is no family magazine like it now. But then, the family itself has disintegrated, if you are to believe the higher journalism.

      How much brighter magazines are today. How they proliferate. How they specialise. Six on yachting. Seventeen or eighteen on cars. Twenty, thirty, on cooking and dieting. СКАЧАТЬ