The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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      I catch whooping cough from someone at school.

      Whooping cough was common in the days before there were inoculations against it. It is extremely infectious. If babies catch it, they may suffer brain damage or die.

      It is somehow typical of me to be ill at a crucial time, when Dot is about to give birth. It is the last day of April, the next best thing to the Ides of March.

      The maids keep me in the back room. Trying to stifle my coughs, I listen as they read Alice in Wonderland to me. I am more or less aware of people in the rest of the flat, tramping about as if this were a boarding house. Nurse Webb, of course. Doctor Duygan, with his black bag. Bill, up from the shop. The baby is delivered in the middle of Chapter Six.

      Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer-shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all directions, ‘just like a starfish’, thought Alice.

      It is a girl! Praise the Lord! This time, it is a girl! No tears from the mother this time. Our united prayers have been answered with unusual efficiency.

      Bill enters the back room, flustered and uttering a series of short, sharp edicts. I must get some shoes on. He is going to take me to Grandma Wilson immediately. I cannot stay in the house in my infectious state.

      A little suitcase is already packed.

      I am bewildered.

      But why—?

      I just told you. Come along.

      I am allowed as far as the threshold of the maternal bedroom. Dot is in bed. She lifts up in triumph a little wizened howling thing. A cursory glance suggests it is much like Alice’s starfish. Its mouth is open and bright red. Scarcely less red is the rest of it.

      Elizabeth Joy, my sister Betty, has emerged successfully into the world and looks none too pleased about it. She sums up what she sees in a shrill bawl.

      Only a glimpse is permitted me. It is enough. Peering back into the past, you find some episodes are written in mist, some on stone. Here is stone enough to last as long as life. The overheated room, those windows looking out to blank walls, the nurse in the background with her starched bosom, the rumpled bed, the triumphant, sweating woman in the bed, the scarlet babe, howling as it is held aloft like a banner – only a glimpse is needed. The tableau is going to remain for ever.

      I have no words.

      Bill gets me downstairs and into the car. I clutch the suitcase. We head for Peterborough.

      When will I come back home? I ask Bill. Bill does not know.

      The film ends.

      John Bowlby, who died in 1990, was a towering figure in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis. His monumental work is in three volumes entitled Attachment, Separation: anxiety and anger and Loss: sadness and depression. They appeared respectively in 1969, 1973 and 1980. I could not read them properly for the overwhelming sense of sorrow they conveyed.

      In one of his other books, Child Care and the Growth of Love, Bowlby has this to say:

      It is common in Western communities to see in the removal of a child from home the solution to many a family problem, without there being any appreciation of the gravity of the step and, often, without there being any clear plan for the future. It is too often forgotten that in removing a child of five from home direct responsibility is taken for his future health and happiness for a decade to come, and that in removing an infant the crippling of his character is at risk.

      From all this the trite conclusion is reached that family life is of pre-eminent importance and that ‘there’s no place like home’.

      So, in an extreme state of bewilderment, I was dropped at my grandmother’s house. There Bill left me.

      My grandmother’s house was to me what the blacking factory was to Charles Dickens. So greatly did that enforced stay fill me with guilt and dismay, that I dared speak of it to no one until I was well into adulthood.

      The Five Year Abyss swallowed me up. I stayed in Peterborough in Grandma Wilson’s house for six months before being allowed to return to Dereham.

      Wait. That is untrue. That is what I believed for many years, until I was adult and out of the Army, sufficiently hardened to look back into that exile. There were details I could check. Whereupon I found I was kept away from home not for six months, but a mere six weeks.

      I could scarcely credit it. How long did Charles Dickens spend in the blacking factory? We know the humiliation of that episode in Dickens’ childhood went so deep that he was unable to speak of it until he was a middle-aged man.

      And supposing it had been six months. The exile seemed to stretch for ever throughout boyhood, parching it like a bitter wind. Nothing grew. At night I lay awake, mute, alone.

      The woman still lay in her rumpled bed, grinning as she held aloft a screaming child.

      At last I had been replaced.

      On that last day of April, snatched from home, I was simply stunned. I recall Bill’s hasty leave-taking, as he deposited me with Grandma and Uncle Bert at Brinkdale and then turned back for home and his wife and new child.

      Here we are again, happy as can be—

      All good pals and jolly good companee …

      It was one of uncle’s many snatches of song he liked to sing on any suitable occasion. And how well he and Grandma looked after me in those weeks.

      And how ill I was. The chest X-ray showed no complications. The doctor held up the misty mysterious plate, where for the first time I could look into the seemingly empty interiors of myself, or at any rate of a person resembling a ghostly mummy. There I saw a section of my skeleton, waiting patiently for its true birthday in three score and ten years’ time, when it would emerge from entombment in the flesh.

      In the year that H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine was published in London, a paper was published in the city of Würzburg by Wilhelm Roentgen, entitled ‘Uber eine neue Art von Strahlen’. The new rays were X-rays. The ghostly outlines of Frau Roentgen’s hand may still be seen, complete with a ring on one bony finger. The plate is as precious an artifact, in its way, as the great Tiepolo ceiling adorning Würzburg Residenz. The human body, resplendent in the vision of the Venetian artist, garbed in fine raiment, has become transparent, without colour, shadowy, permeable.

      And shadowy and permeable I felt. My illness was not merely physical. It was the illness of a child, in Bowlby’s words, crippled.

      No teddy bear ever accompanied me to bed. Instead, a golliwog called Peter played sentry to my soul through the night watches. Peter was an invention of Dot’s. He was black because he was constructed of the tops of one of the maid’s cast-off black stockings.

      Peter’s soggy shape was clothed in garments Dot knitted or made up from pieces of felt. Two linen buttons such as served in the 1920s to secure underpants were used as Peter’s blind, staring eyes. The mouth was a curve of green wool, the hair a startling red crew cut. Small wonder I have had a taste for the macabre ever since!

      And the first night I was tucked between Grandma’s sheets in a small СКАЧАТЬ