The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ did not stop annoying Hitler; instead he warned us that war was coming. And for that event he made sensible preparations.

      In that hot summer of 1938, I walked into town and back to buy my favourite magazine, Modern Boy. Nobody was about. The streets were deserted. The air was heavy, windows were open. Every radio in every house was tuned to the Test Match. It was England’s innings. Len Hutton was notching up remarkable scores against Australia.

      Modern Boy had rearmament stamps to collect, battleships, tanks, heavy guns. I was excited; Mother said, ‘That’s nothing to look forward to.’ Neville Chamberlain was preparing to fly to Munich to discuss the fate of Czechoslovakia. In the house next to us, on the other side to the Boxbaums, Mrs Newton – devoted to her afternoon bottle of gin – threw open her bedroom window and screamed, ‘Help! Help! The Spaniards are coming!’

      A correct statement in essence. Only the nationality was mistaken.

      Perhaps in every childhood there comes a defining moment when, by some trick of behaviour, one is made aware for the first time of one’s own character, and that one has a personal idiolect of beliefs. And possibly that moment of insight – which remains always in memory – is a herald of one’s adult nature.

      As a small boy of three or four, I was taken by my parents to a tall narrow stone house in Wisbech, on the Wash. There, among a muddle of armchairs, lived a number of distant cousins on my mother’s side of the family.

      Permitted to run out into the garden, I saw among a clump of irises the perfect webs of the chubby-backed garden spider (araneus diadematus). I had admired this pretty spider, and its industry, in my grandmother’s garden in Peterborough. The intricate construction of the web was a task I had watched with respectful attention.

      A passing butterfly, a cabbage white, flew into one of the webs. As its struggles began, a small girl in a white frock rushed from the house. Seeing the plight of the butterfly, she screamed at me to save it from the nasty spider.

      Although I was keen to please the girl, I could not but see the matter from the spider’s point of view; in hesitating, I allowed her to rush out from her corner and seize upon the butterfly. The girl was distressed, and ran back into the house in tears, saying how horrid I was. Well, I too felt it was gruesome; but the butterfly’s agonies were brief and the spider had as much right to live as anyone.

      Heaving themselves up from their armchairs, emerging from the house, angry distant cousins gained proximity. I was seriously scolded and ushered indoors – unfit to stay in their nice garden.

      Upset though I was – and feeling a degree of guilt – I knew the grown-ups were wrong. The sundry shortcomings of nature, like the way in which we all ate each other or perished, were givens with which one had to live. In the circumstances, observation made more sense than interference. Unfortunately, this has become rather a lifetime principle.

      Dot and I watched Bill as he rubbed black Cherry Blossom boot polish into his sideburns, which grey had already invaded. Preparing a lie about his age, he walked down to the recruiting office in Gorleston and volunteered for the RAF. He could still fly. He was lean and fit, forty-eight pretending to be forty-two. The recruiting officer turned him down. Bill was a brave man, and was shaken by this rejection.

      His thoughts then turned to our safety. We could see the North Sea from our attic window. When war came, we would be shelled or bombed – or, of course, invaded. Bill decided therefore that we should move to the other end of the country.

      In the school holidays of summer 1939, Betty and I walked barefoot from the house down to the beaches and promenades, to spend our whole sunny day there as usual, on the sand, in the sea, chatting to shopkeepers, sailing a clockwork speedboat in the yacht pool, or watching the Punch and Judy show (every scene of which we had by heart).

      The front at Gorleston provided a spectacle of which we never tired. It was safe and peaceful. Somewhere across the sea, the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and the more firmly entrenched regime of Stalin’s Soviet Union were busy at their gruesome tasks of enslaving and killing whole populations.

      But the British Empire was safe, the colour bar securely in place in its colonies. Tea was still served at four, while the Yankee dollar was worth only two half-crowns.

      Betty and I were happy in Gorleston. When I fell ill and was confined to bed, I wrote and illustrated a long verse drama set in Victorian times. The story moved freely from a stage play into real life and back. Where I got the idea from I do not know; now it is a commonplace of deconstructionists – a word unknown in the thirties. It was my first sustained piece of writing. Its subject was the question of appearances: something was happening but – wait! – it was merely being acted!

      From the local Woolworth – then still ‘The 3d and 6d Stores’ – Betty and I bought issues of McGlennan’s Song Book. In triple columns, it published the words of the latest popular songs. Betty and I sat in bed together, singing songs made famous by Hutch, Dorothy Carless, Gracie Fields and others: if not melodiously, enthusiastically.

      Being mere children, Betty and I were not privy to Bill’s plans. One day, we were hauled in from the beach and told we were going on holiday to the West Country, to Devon.

      The Bernard Road house was closed up, our beloved cat Tiny was left in a neighbour’s care. We then undertook a trek across the south of England, arriving eventually at Witheridge, in the middle of Devon. Norfolk born and bred, we were impressed by, or perhaps a little contemptuous of, the hills and valleys; we had grown to prefer a flat world. In Witheridge we stayed on Thorn’s farm, where the young farmer’s wife fed us enormous breakfasts and evening meals. My fourteenth birthday occurred on the farm; my parents gave me a watch.

      The sights, sounds and smells of the farm absorbed all our attention. In Witheridge, they had never heard of Hitler. Bill had his gun, went out shooting rabbits, was a countryman again, trying to forget his recent disasters in East Dereham.

      The time of childhood was not entirely over. Whatever my new watch said, hours and days were still dawdling by. On the farm we had for company other creatures who did not live in the brisk adult time flow: the calves, young sheep, kittens and the Thorns’ two dogs. We measured out our days in Wellington boots. It was a timeless time – less than a month away from the declaration of war.

      We left the farm and drove to a place called Pinhoe, on the outskirts of Exeter, where Father bought a caravan. We had to live in it for two days on the sales area by a busy road until Bill’s cheque was cleared by the local bank.

      Towing the caravan, we drove to Cornwall, sleeping overnight – sensation – in a farmer’s field. Next day, we arrived at Widemouth Bay, to the west of Bude. Betty and I had yet to realise that that caravan was actually our home.

      Widemouth was a beautiful wild place, not far from Tintagel, legendary home of King Arthur. Sheep had grazed the grass short to the very edge of the cliffs. Contained in the bowl of pasture was a small whitewashed cottage which served as the only shop for miles; it sold milk, bread, and – more importantly as far as Betty and I were concerned – Lyons’ fruit pies, 4d. Just beyond the shop was a sheer drop of cliff to the rocks below, all vastly different from the tame seasides of the Norfolk coast. We climbed the rocks, ventured into deep pools, caught small fish, watched the waters of the Atlantic wallop into barnacled fissures in the cliff face. Whatever I did, my small sister followed faithfully.

      Close by the whitewashed cottage, one other caravan stood. From our caravan window we enjoyed a panorama of the Atlantic. How quiet was the Atlantic in those brassy August days! And I ventured at last to pluck up courage and ask Bill, ‘Will I go back to Framlingham?’

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