The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss
us. Most of the school tramped down the road to Filleigh station. I remained behind. Someone I knew was coming by in a tradesman’s van to pick me up and give me a lift into Barnstaple.
My thought had been that I would leave Buckland without regret: or, if not Buckland, then those painful years of adolescence. Standing outside the front of the school, its buildings now all but empty, I felt the weight of an ending heavy on my shoulders. A phase of life, with its wearying sequence of lessons, punishments, discomfort and incarceration, had seemed to drag on for ever. In the last two years, it had provided its successes, had even become pleasant. As to what the future would bring, I had not the slightest idea. Prophetic gifts are rare; in wartime, one is all too aware of the fact.
Warfare is a whale, swallowing up its young like krill. Even as I left WBS for good, British and American forces were fighting their way through Sicily. Sinister railway trains with their packed cattle trucks were proceeding eastwards from Germany to the extermination camps.
The historian A. J. P. Taylor said of World War I that it was imposed on Europe’s statesmen by railway timetables; that that war was the climax of the railway age. In World War II, wickedness fuelled the trains that ran eastwards with their doomed thousands from the Nazi-occupied countries. The climax, not of the railways, but of human beastliness – so far.
Back at Meadow Way, I received my Enlistment Notice from the Ministry of Labour and National Service. I was called upon for service in the Army, and was required to present myself, on 18 November 1943, to No. 52 Primary Training Wing, under the aegis of the Royal Norfolks, at Britannia Barracks, Norwich.
A travel warrant and postal order for four shillings in advance of service pay were enclosed with the demand.
Failure to report on time would render me liable to be arrested and brought before a Court of Summary Jurisdiction.
So Britannia Barracks it was – quite a distance from North Devon. By coincidence, it was the same barracks to which Bill had had to report in 1914, twenty-nine years earlier.
Even the feeblest children grow up to become soldiers – for good or ill.
The burden of the long gone years: the weight,
The lifeless weight, of miserable things
Done long ago, not done with: the live stings
Left by old joys, follies provoking fate,
Showing their sad side, when it is too late …
Lionel Johnson
Experience
A time of war is comparatively easy to describe. One’s personal details can be crosschecked against grand external events. And an adult memory, working on adult time, has filed away its record, for good or ill. But to return to childhood, to the Permian mud of infancy, is to enter a more questionable area. We may see certain distant events with clarity. But on either side of the event, fogs roll in. And were those events in fact the events as they are ‘clearly remembered’?
My uncomfortable advantage is that I see – believe I see – much of my first five years of life with clarity. For when I am five years old, something happens to me resembling the fall of a guillotine blade, severing past from future.
Those early formative years can roll like a film and are as untrustworthy as a movie, however sincerely truth is attempted, for the movie has been edited by time.
It is mid-August, two o’clock of a summer’s morning. The newborn infant lies in its cot in that eternal present tense preserved in memory. It is a boy, with the slight blemish of a port wine mark on its forehead. It will be christened Brian Wilson Aldiss, thus bearing the names of both sides of the family. It cries a little.
It is born at home, in its parents’ bedroom. Its mother lies exhausted, a nurse hovering over her. She also cries. She had hoped for a baby girl.
The boy is a disappointment, and will be made to feel that keenly. It lies listening to its mother’s muffled sobs. The curtain of its life goes up; but, as in an Ibsen play, there is already a terrible past history awaiting revelation. One day, someone will knock at the door and then the whole charade of normality will fall apart.
Already deception is brewing like a thunder cloud about the infant. The deception will masquerade as truth for many years, and devour tissue like a cancer. The mother, almost without willing it, is brooding on a consoling fantasy which will survive undetected for sixty years, and accumulate a burden of anguish meanwhile.
This is the story of how, for much of that time, I was not so much living as being entangled with life.
Such is often the case with first-borns: but should I count myself a first- or second-born? For sixty years, that too remained a puzzle. No wonder the infant cried a little!
The name of the mother sobbing comfortably in her feather bed is Elizabeth May Aldiss, née Wilson, generally known as Dot. She is married to Stanley Aldiss, generally known as Bill. Bill and Dot always address each other by these invented names.
Something of their history is in order before the camera of memory turns its lens towards the newcomer in its cot.
The sepia deepens as we sink back into the late nineteenth century.
Dot is born in Peterborough, on 1 June 1884, the fourth child of Elizabeth and Allen Wilson, the other three children being boys.
The Wilsons are a jolly lot. Their origins are humble, but Allen has one great advantage to set against his ‘lack of background’, as people used to say. He has great charm of character. Unlike many charmers, he is industrious. He becomes a builder and rises out of poverty. A. W.’s and Sarah Elizabeth’s four children largely inherit these pleasing traits. In order of seniority – the children are christened Allen, Herbert (Bert), Ernest and Elizabeth May. Elizabeth May is doted on by all the family, the family’s dear little spoilt girl.
Although the film is blurred, we perceive that the Edwardian period is good for the Wilsons. The family moves to a bigger house, a solid semi-detached in a respectable street, which A. W. has built. My grandfather, prospering, never works after lunch at this time. He smokes cigars or plays billiards. He now owns four houses in Park Road, and becomes secretary to the active Baptist Church at the bottom of the street. He breeds pigeons; pigeons of all kinds and colours, pigeons with puffed-out breasts, pigeons with none.
Allen Woodward Wilson Esq. becomes President of the All England Pigeon Fanciers Association. After his humble beginnings, he is happy to feel himself to be a man of some substance. On the occasions when he goes away on business, A. W. wears a top hat and employs a small boy to carry his case to the LNER station.
The film is a silent one. Now comes a card bearing the ominous caption: ‘The Great War’.
In 1914, the brothers are of an age to join in the general slaughter. Off they go, Allen, Bert, Ernie, waving gallantly from the train as they leave from Peterborough station. The boys’ mother weeps as she waves until the train draws out of sight; A. W. raises his top hat. Their sons are starting a journey that will take them to the mud of the trenches on the Western Front, and captivity in a German oflag. At least they will all survive the slaughter, and live to tell a small part of the tale.
Allen becomes a lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of the Northampton regiment. Bert becomes a lieutenant in the 23rd Northumberland Fusiliers. Ernie joins the Royal Air Force.
The first German words I shall learn will be inscribed on a slender white enamel sign: Rauchen Verboten. The uncles will remove the sign as a souvenir from a compartment in the train which, in 1918, will bear them back to liberty and the rest of their lives.
The history of