The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ work. His nest egg from Dereham looked less generous now. He and Dot drove a long way in search of a viable property. He had always been good at property deals, but the war made values uncertain. A newsagent’s shop in Chard, Somerset attracted him. There was something in Wincanton. Mother liked the idea of a tearoom. Or perhaps a shop in Exeter?

      Exeter had many beautiful old features. Some narrow streets were medieval, resembling the Shambles in York. A particularly interesting book shop stood beside the cathedral. Life continued there as normal; how else? Except that some public buildings were fortified by walls of sandbags.

      At first, I hated West Buckland. The grounds on which the school stands were donated by a local landowner, the Second Earl Fortescue, in the 1850s. The Fortescue family still live near by and maintain their friendly connection with the school. WBS consists of a series of stone buildings, not unlike a prison in appearance (in the manner of most public schools), well suited to the rather bare landscape in which it was planted. The quads were of an amazing draughtiness, as the wind howled in from the Atlantic, past Morte Point, bouncing over Fullabrook and Whitefield Downs, clowning its way across the Seven Sisters, to arrive in time for morning parade outside the headmaster’s offices.

      WBS was heroically uncomfortable. In those early months of the war, everything in the country was in confusion. The school shared in that confusion. Compelled to take on extra boys, many of them evacuated from London, it scarcely knew how to house them. I found myself deposited in an emergency form room with an emergency name, Lower IV A. The room, with its raked desks, had been a chemistry lecture room. The desks were open; nothing could be stowed away in them. Nor were there such luxuries as common rooms. After class, you stayed in the classroom. There was no privacy. The blackout added to the gloom. All around, the winds and rains of Exmoor prowled and hammered at the buildings.

      I was completely uprooted. The distance between East Dereham and West Buckland was too great.

      I wrote to Bill to say that I wished to be taken away. Answer came from my mother that I would have to stick things out. There was nowhere else to go. My sister, meanwhile, had been sent to a school in Bideford. That did not suit her. She also begged to be rescued. Probably she begged more vehemently than I. She was rescued.

      But things sorted themselves out. I was also in the throes of puberty – a rather delayed puberty, it seemed. In the baths after rugger, hulking great dayboys sported clumps of pubic bush, sticking out dismally like Norwegian beards.

      A few bubbles foamed from my pipeline, then, at last, the real thing, that phlegm-like substance which makes babies. Puberty is a time of anxiety for boys: will they ever, preferably next week, possess massive dongs like the dayboys, together with thickets of hair like the furze on Hardy’s Egdon Heath? Then, low and behold, the miracle happens! There it is, the new weapon, in the pink, sniffing inquisitively at the randy world … And many kinds of interesting childish thought are doomed: instead you start wondering how you can get hold of a girl, get a hand down her blouse and up her skirt – particularly up her skirt – and feel her all over, to check on the legends you are hearing from all sides.

      It must have been about that time I recited, ‘Hush, hush, whisper who dares. Christopher Robin is counting his hairs.’

      So there it was. Constant erections to set against the draughty dormitories, the meagre meals, the parades, the clanging of the school bell. Ask not for what the bell tolls: it tolls for your erection.

      I grew to love West Buckland. Perhaps it was in my second term, the term when, even on bleak Exmoor, winter yields to spring. The lanes round about East and West Buckland burst forth in primroses, primroses trailing as far as Shallowford, about which Henry Williamson wrote, the hedges fill with birds’ nests, and the nests with eggs. Soon, rugger will give way to cricket.

      At Framlingham, we were incarcerated within the grounds, as in a high-security prison. At Buckland, we could get exeats which allowed us to wander the countryside on Sundays. You dressed in your rugger kit, collected some rough-and-ready sandwiches from the kitchens, and off you went in twos or threes. Wild Exmoor! How free it seemed, how strange! Once, Bowler and I saw a stag up on the hills. Shallow streams, ideal for damming, meandered about. And there were pits, corries more correctly, full of pure spring water, paved with pebbles six feet down. We actually took dips in them. They were freezing. We splashed and shouted in agony. Coming out, we pulled on shirt and shorts and ran about howling to restore circulation, yelling and laughing at our own madness.

      Beatings at WBS were euphemistically known as ‘dabbing’. The custom was to make no sound while the beating was in progress.

      I grew to relish the Spartan aspect of WBS and the grittiness of playing rugger in the teeming rain. But wartime WBS lacked the contrasts needed to fill the bleak hours after prep: magnificent productions of opera and plays, films with talks by travellers, scientific demonstrations to excite intellectual curiosity, rich things. Our form was not alone in enjoying education, in seeking to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is to civilisation what DNA is to inheritance.

      The nurture side of school life needed improvement; shutting boys up in teenage monasteries was not the answer. WBS went coeducational some years ago, under Michael Downward, an enlightened headmaster. As one token of his enlightenment, Michael recently made me Vice-president of the school.

      Bill settled on a property near Barnstaple, a corner shop up for sale. I felt sadness for my father, and disgrace for myself. What a comedown from H. H. Aldiss’s shop in Dereham! The Barnstaple shop was a small general store. It sold groceries, cigarettes and newspapers, and housed a sub-post office in one corner.

      Bill applied himself to this new trade with dedication. He opened the shop out, incorporating a small storeroom into the design. When rationing began, a coupon had to be exacted for every tin of baked beans, every quarter-pound of sugar. All coupons had to be cut from ration books. Accounting had to be done every weekend. Dot ran the post office. Both of them worked day and night, with no time for their children. We lived in tiny rooms behind and over the shop.

      The straggling village of Bickington proved friendly. The post office counter gave Mother an ideal conversation post. Her character changed; she became open and genial. The fears and suspicions of Dereham were things of the past. In no time, she was elected Chairman of the local Women’s Institute, and was a popular success. The tradesmen ate out of her hand. Throughout the war, we never lacked for food. Sometimes fresh salmon, poached from a local river, was on the menu.

      Cockney evacuees came down from London. The Women’s Institute proved equal to the task, and welcomed them with a reception – tea and music. Among the evacuees was a splendid strapping blond woman, a Mrs McKechnie – plainly a whore, loud and rude, but that traditional thing, a whore with a heart of gold – with whom Dot became friendly.

      When the first wartime Christmas came round, I asked Bill if we were going to go to church, as previously we had always done in East Dereham.

      He regarded me almost with scorn. ‘No,’ he explained.

      It was impossible to make new friends in school holidays. One was there for so short a time. Penny North and I had a pale affection for each other. Betty and I played together, two strange children who got in the way of Bill’s shop activities. We dressed up and made stinks with my chemistry set, yet never managed quite to blow anything up. When she was ill, I made her a book of stories and drawings, The Stock-Pot Book.

      One advantage of the cramped house was that you could climb out of my bedroom window on to a narrow ledge, then to another ledge, and from that get down to the ground. At night, I could escape by that route and walk about the blacked-out village.

      More interestingly, I could climb out of a rear window, work my way across a rooftop, and СКАЧАТЬ