The Twinkling of an Eye

3

The School

Suddenly, after a long silence, he began to talk … ‘A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.’

Carlos Castaneda

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

We held a ‘Wings for Victory’ fair on WBS rugger field, the Huxtable. It was a great event. Our vendettas against local farmers were set aside so that we could borrow their carts. I turned what had been shameful into satire against myself and became Adolf for a day.

Some years previously, one of the innumerable Framlingham bullies, a creature with the skin of a bullfrog and hyperthyroid eyes to match, grabbed me and declared that I resembled Adolf Hitler. Dragging me into his foul den, he pulled a lock of my hair down over my forehead and painted a moustache of black boot polish on my upper lip. I was then made to goose-step round a senior common room, giving the Sieg Heil for the delectation of all the other bullies – many of whom would doubtless have given their eyeteeth to dress up in Nazi uniforms, rape Slav women, and bugger each other while strangling Jews.

By Buckland’s ‘Wings for Victory’ day, I had sufficiently recovered from this degradation to put the act to good use. Suitably uniformed, I mounted one of the farm carts and addressed all and sundry in gibber-German, looking remarkably like Adolf. Or so my friends and admirers told me later.

Hitler still exerts an awful attraction. He has proved to be many things to many men. Hugh Trevor-Roper captured something of the truth when he described Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries.’

Well, that does sound fascinating …

It is terrible to think one should still hold Hitler in mind. And I once imitated him! Even the young and innocent are fascinated by wickedness. I suppose it helped prepare us at WBS to be soldiers.

To Crasher Fay I owe more than mere learning. For English classes, we had to produce an essay every Monday. I was excused. Crasher permitted me to present a story instead. A gratifying privilege as we trudged towards the School Certificate …

By this time, the writing of short stories had become a continuous occupation. Our form enjoyed, shared, quoted, laughed aloud at Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, as well as their less famous books, such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote ‘Invalids and Illnesses’. It was sanitary enough to take home, where my mother read it. I overheard her saying to someone, after reading out a funny bit about diphtheria, ‘You may not like it, but it is clever.’ Eavesdroppers seldom hear good about themselves; I felt she had summed me up.

Most of my stories were less sanitary. They were mainly planetary adventures, dirty SF, crime, or dirty crime. Screwing featured largely. I often wrote in the dormitory, under the bedclothes by torch-light. The stories always remained first draft. Penny-a-read was the nominal charge. Nobody paid, everyone read. It was gratifying. A superior fellow in the Sixth, a horn-rimmed Harrison, said, ‘Aldiss, these tales of yours are ridiculous and badly constructed.’

He was probably right. But I wrote compulsively, and risked beating and expulsion if they fell into the wrong hands.

I also wrote and illustrated a series of comic tales, ‘The Jest-So Stories’. At term’s end, Bowler and I put all the manuscripts in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and buried it in a rabbit burrow in the Plantation, from where we retrieved it the following term.

I became prolific. At one of my more acceptable sardonic stories, presented as a Monday offering, Fay took offence. After reading parts of it aloud, he stared hard at me and said, ‘I warn you, Aldiss, if you go on like this you’ll become another Evelyn Waugh.’ Never had I heard such praise.

Bowler was a great character. He, Saxby, and I were jokers-in-chief. Don Smith was a more sophisticated type. He brought a wind-up gramophone and played jazz records. We heard for the first time Tommy Dorsey and Orchestra playing ‘Getting Sentimental Over You’, and, ah!, Jimmie Lunceford and his band playing ‘Blues in the Night’, with the Johnny Mercer lyrics:

From Natchez to Mobile

From Memphis to Saint Joe,

Wherever the four winds blow …

And wherever those cities were, there I wanted to be. I saw the movie Blues in the Night, which features Jimmy Lunceford, eighteen times over the years, in England and abroad. Almost as many times as Citizen Kane. As an adult, I sang the song in duet with the philosopher A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayers.

End of term. Back to that dreary Bickington shop on the corner. And now great excitement. Following Pearl Harbor, the United States of America had entered the war. On our side. What was more, an American regiment was to be flown over to Fremington.

Fremington was next to Bickington; one village straggled into the other along the main road. Under Dot’s guiding hand, the Bickington Women’s Institute decided to give the Americans a slap-up reception. Music and dancing would be the order of the day. There would be food and soft drinks. No alcohol, since we had heard the American forces drank – unlike, of course, our boys. Everything was made ready.

The American regiment arrived. It was black. In those days, the US segregated its soldiery by colour.

What a fluttering in the dovecotes! Committee meeting! A sensible decision was arrived at. Black Americans were in the war just like anyone else, and would soon have to fight in Europe. The slap-up reception must continue exactly as planned.

So black troops poured into Bickington, and the party went ahead. It was a roaring success. The music veered from the hot—

I’ll be round to meet you in a taxi, honey,

Better be ready ’bout a ha’ past eight—

to the sentimental—

I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine

The Bickington ladies, including Mrs McKechnie, were delighted with their own wisdom. The black Americans were charmed to find themselves in a country without any colour prejudice …

At school, we made a discovery. Mr H. G. Wells was still alive! It amazed and cheered us. We were accustomed to reading books by dead authors; the books we studied were by the illustrious dead, from Hillard & Botting onward. But the great imaginer was living in London, a city more devastated by German bombs than by his Martians.

I read and wrote. Most eagerly I read Astounding, in which, to my mind, the future was being born. Chicken Coupland caught me reading an issue in class. Seizing it, he tore it into small pieces, damning it for rubbish. I had been in the middle of a Theodore Sturgeon story.

My difficulties with Sammy continued. The one master on my side was my housemaster, Harold Boyer. Harold was of mixed English-German descent, and hence presumably not allowed to serve in HM Forces. He arrived at the school in 1940 and went on to become a governor of the school and an HM Inspector of Schools.

Harold could teach anything. His manner was somewhat theatrical. He would prowl before us, slapping one hand in the other. ‘Facts, facts, you must have facts.’ He was making reference to the School Certificate exams, which began to loom over us.

He became head of the house I was in, and showed a genuine interest in our lives. Like Crasher Fay, he rarely if ever beat people. He was a humorous man. After I had left school I discovered just what amusing company he was. Harold then revealed a bawdy subversive streak, whereas in the form room he could resemble a one-man version of the Holy Roman Empire.

Like the other masters, Harold shared Buckland’s general discomfort. Unmarried masters generally had rooms within the school. Harold, being married to Isabel, and having three daughters, lived in a cottage two miles away in Charles Bottom – always known as Charlie’s Arse. Sometimes we saw the dark-haired Isabel pushing a pushchair up to school; this sight caused some excitement among the sex-starved.

Finally, our form came to the test – School Cert., later to become GCE. Although my militaristic spirit was rather more pinko than khaki, I had passed Cert. A, the OTC exam, a necessity for becoming an army officer. I was less confident about School Certificate. At that precarious stage in life, one’s whole future appeared to depend on the wretched exam. And I had not always paid the greatest attention. Was I not ‘Foo’, the demon humorist of the Middle Fifth?! (‘Foo’ was a favourite expletive used in Bill Holman’s prize surrealist comic strip, ‘Smokey Stover’.)

Sammy did everything to make life difficult. On the morning of the first exam, tension was high. We were to proceed into the memorial hall to widely spaced desks. On the way, I dropped my inkwell. Ink splashed over the stone passage. This Sammy seized on in a fury. Here was a chance to humiliate the comedian!

I was made to go down to the kitchens, fetch a bucket of hot water, and swab up the mess. One of the menservants could easily have done the job. As a result I entered the hall late and flustered. When I made a return visit to the school after the war, I observed a faint blue stain still marking the site of my accident: the Aldiss Memorial Blob.

We went through the exams, playing tennis between times. A week in limbo, isolated from the rest of school and from the future. At the end of term my report reached home. Sammy wrote on the bottom of the report that I had behaved so badly I did not deserve to pass the exam.

It was a low blow. Bill was furious. Was this all I cared for all their sacrifices? He mentioned in passing how much money he had wasted on my education. As usual, I stood before him without defence. Not for the first time I wondered why, when I admired my father so, I was mute in his presence.

After the ticking off, he and Dot were hardly on speaking terms with me. I could not explain. Before the most patient interlocutor I could not have explained the difficulties of matching two conflicting sets of interests, education and growing up. Indeed, these difficulties remain hard to reconcile. You strive to become adult, which means rejecting the control of your elders; yet to become educated you must submit to their discipline.

‘Your father is really upset,’ was all Dot would say when I tried to approach her. ‘You didn’t work, did you?’ She too suffered from conflicting loyalties.

That was always her role in our little army: the NCO between the Commanding Officer and his tiny conscripts.

Bill and Dot were an incompatible pair. Whatever had occurred between them in the early stages of their marriage, during the wartime years and afterwards, they stood together. When things were most trying for them, at the Bickington store in particular they saw the necessity for solidarity, even at the expense of their children. However greatly they had once disappointed each other, they remained loyal and devoted. Over all, they set Betty and me a persuasive argument for marriage and its loyalties – an argument I later found myself unable to follow.

Under the shadow of Bill’s silent disapproval, my fragile morale evaporated. Only at school had there been friends to turn to. I slipped under the ever-threatening shadow of my own disapproval. I took to climbing apple trees and falling out of them, but received only bruises rather than the desired broken neck. Even there I seemed to lack determination.

Successes glittered occasionally amid the prevailing shades of failure. I persuaded Betty to scale the north face of the roof and enter the deserted bakery with me. We established a museum in our old disused stable, filling it with stones, fossils and sheeps’ skulls found in nearby fields.

It was during this period that Mussolini was arrested and killed. We were treated to newsreel footage of him hanging upside down, like a pig’s carcass. How dare I make anything of my sufferings when the great world was undergoing a kind of death agony, and millions were dispossessed or dying? Who am I to cry out? No great religion has ever proposed that life is a bed of roses.

Those summer holidays were a sickness. The days wasted away, one by one. Exam results were due to arrive by post on 5 September. The day of my complete humiliation drew nigh. On 3 September, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, I woke early, cowering in bed, listening for the sound of the postman. I was determined I could not face the parents at the breakfast table. In the end, I felt driven to go downstairs.

The post had brought no communication.

Next morning, anxiety roused me. I sat hunched up in bed, listening for the postman, to crawl downstairs when I knew breakfast had come and gone and Bill was in the shop.

On the following morning, worn out by worry, I overslept.

I was awakened by both parents rushing into my bedroom, waving pieces of paper. A modestly brilliant result! I had passed the School Cert. exam with five credits out of seven, and thus had matriculated. So delighted – and shamed? – was Bill that he thrust a cheque for ten pounds into my hand. So astonished was I that I took it.

All my past is accepted. Yet still there remains regret that I did not reject that conscience money. I had never possessed ten pounds before; but it was my submissiveness that led me to accept the cheque so meekly, and smile while doing so, without a word of reproach.

The incident smoulders still. It seems to epitomise much that was wrong with my parents’ relationship with their lad – and the lad with them.

At the beginning of the next school holiday, I returned to the shop to find another change. The shop was still there, but Bill had bought a bungalow, Meadow Way, half a mile away, on the main road to Fremington. The accommodation was better and Bill could walk up to the shop every morning.

Such memories as I have of that bungalow are entirely neutral. It was bought, taken over, and we lived there. The pieces of furniture we possessed were arranged in rooms. There was no sense that anything might be improved; we had to take the place as we found it. Nowadays, having bought a house, one expects to make all manner of alterations; conservatories are added, rewiring is done, or perhaps an attic room is created. The place is redecorated. Such ideas never entered our heads as far as wartime houses were concerned.

In the same way, clothing had no style. I wore Bill’s cast-off sports jackets, and grey flannel trousers. I suppose everything we owned looked shabby, but we were unaware of it. In the evenings, after work, Dot and Bill padded about the place, smoking, in pre-war slippers.

On Christmas Day, there was Bill, at the ironing board, ironing out the wrapping paper from our presents, to preserve it in a cupboard safely for the following December. Parsimony was a kind of patriotism.

There was no going off on holiday in wartime. Betty and I walked all over the place and sketched and painted together. Betty attended an art school in Bideford and was already inclining towards costume. Unknown to us then, a pathway to the BBC was opening up ahead of her.

Dot was altogether a more cheerful person. She laughed a lot. Over the breakfast table, she would regale us with her ludicrous dreams, which generally centred around sexual embarrassments. She would lose her corsets during an important meeting at the post office; or she would be caught by a farmer relieving herself in one of his haystacks.

Much listening to the radio went on. Everyone’s memoirs of the war years include a compulsory reference to Tommy Handley’s I.T.M.A. We too listened devotedly, and spouted all the catch phrases. One benefit the war brought was an importation of American radio shows. So we learnt of Duffy’s Tavern, Where the Elite Meet to Eat, and became addicted to the Bob Hope Show with its signature tune ‘Thanks for the Memory’. Bob Hope was a master of one-liners. His description of a totalitarian state is classic: ‘It’s where they name a street after you one day and chase you down it the next.’

Another favourite show was Jack Benny’s, with his black servant, Rochester. We heard later, in the time of Martin Luther King and the raising of black consciousness, that Rochester came to be regarded as an Uncle Tom. However that might be, he was the character we liked best on the show.

Woods and fields surrounded Meadow Way, in which Betty and I strayed. We could also, with difficulty, get down to the rolling river Taw. I wrote and illustrated a book about our adventures, real and imaginary. One golden summer, possibly 1942, we picked blackberries from July until October.

Bill still liked to shoot. Rats in the store certainly. Also rabbits for the pot. Rabbit stew with dumplings remained to our Norfolk-bred tastes. On one occasion, Bill invited me to go with him, to a glade not far from the bungalow. I took my .22. As ever, I was nervous in his presence. He seemed so to despise everything I did.

We moved quietly down a tree-shaded lane. I was anxious to prove myself in his eyes. Rabbits sported some distance ahead. He signalled to me not to fire yet. I was a pace or two ahead of him. He wanted to give me a chance.

Happening to glance back, I saw that two or three rabbits had hopped out of the bushes only a few yards behind us. Without thinking, I raised my .22 and fired.

The bullet missed Bill’s ear by little more than an inch.

‘You silly sod,’ he said. I had never heard him swear before. ‘You silly sod. You could have killed me.’

We returned home. I was still trembling and pale. I went to my bedroom and could not emerge again that day. Added to my own crass act was the shock of hearing Father swear. In those more polite days, the harshest words were ‘blinking’, ‘blithering’ and ‘confounded’ … possibly ‘ruddy’.

Back at school, after the dull Bickington holidays, the times were still improving. When we entered the senior forms, we were allowed to join the Home Guard. It accustomed us to wearing khaki uniform, to working with men, and to travelling further afield. Sometimes we carried out exercises on those parts of Saunton Sands that were not mined, firing at each other with blanks.

The only real shooting carried out on that beautiful coastline was for British films. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra was filmed there, as was a scene from the Powell & Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.

The general Sunday procedure was for a lorry to call at the school early in the morning. About ten of us, kitted out, uniformed, with army boots and rifles, would jump in. The lorry would then drive around to nearby farms, picking up the troops. Very few of them had uniforms. Very few of them seemed to know what was what. We christened one farmer’s son the Trout. He did indeed look like a fish. One Sunday, the Trout climbed into the lorry with a poker sticking out from the muzzle of his Lee Enfield. He had used the implement from his hearth to try and clean the barrel of his rifle. There it had stuck.

Life in the Sixth Form is remembered with affection. After nine years – more for some poor wretches – at boarding schools, we had climbed to the top of the pile. There came a sort of breathing space in which to be semi-civilised, to enjoy music and the art club, even conversing with, rather than thumping, each other. We valued the artist Mr Lyons-Wilson, who drove over from Exeter once a week to talk to us of Botticelli and Gainsborough. Although Lyons-Wilson was not without his affectations, his own watercolours were masterly. Also we liked him because – as was the case with Harold Boyer – he was on our side. And amusing.

Most of us belonged to the Phoenix Debating Society, which brought the privilege of a separate reading room. We gave readings of plays and stories for the rest of the school. I argued about religion and was permitted to make funny speeches. We formed a school jazz band in which I was the vocalist, encouraged to yell out the lyrics to ‘In the Mood’. We inclined towards the Don Smith mode of jazz: that is, very bluesy.

You can take my meat and ham gravy too—

But I draw the li-ine when it comes to you.

Yeah man, yeah man, yeah man

The school’s four houses decided to put on house concerts to celebrate end of term. As ever, my situation was uncertain. I had passed School Cert. and was supposedly to study for A Levels, in preparation for my future career. The plan was that, since H. H. Aldiss had been shot from under us, I should become an architect and join my Wilson uncles’ firm in Peterborough.

I was inclined towards the idea. For that purpose, I had given up Latin in order to study German, because only with German went Higher Maths (the vagaries of the educational system were strange, then as now). But Higher Maths under Mr Coupland proved as far beyond me as had Lower Maths. You need the Higher stuff in order to become an architect. I coasted in that last year, and was therefore available for things more amusing than calculus.

Like the house concert.

Bowler was in charge of the Grenville concert, I of the Fortescue concert. With the assistance of Harold Boyer, I wrote all the sketches, poems and catches, and performed in many of them. It was my term. For once my labels, Foo, The Comedian, came fruitful. And instead of Sammy trying to destroy me, there was Boyer to encourage me, and to laugh.

Fortescue House won the contest. Applause and congratulations. Sammy kept out of the way, smoking on his Gold Flakes in his airless study. It was my finest hour, or at least half-hour, for the nursing sister Veronica Talbot was so delighted that she invited me to her room, gave me gin to drink – and kissed me. Yes, Veronica Talbot kissed me on the lips!

My last term at Buckland. Military service loomed. Several of our Six Formers sought for ways to escape call-up. Schemes for further study incurred exemption, if you were clever about it. I wonder how some of my friends who were clever then, and escaped war service to retreat to the sinecure of Edinburgh University or other seats of learning, feel about their strategy now. Confused I might be, but ‘dodging the column’ was never my style.