by Brian Aldiss
On the whole, grannies get a good press, bless them. They’re small, they don’t eat much, and they view television regularly. In the thirties it was different: they never watched television and they smelt of mothballs. As an additional eccentricity marking her off from the rest of humanity, Granny Scoones wore black: black dress, black stockings, black slippers, black bow in her hair. Black knickers too, for a fiver. Her widow’s weeds. Regardless of the fact that the old weed had been dead for about sixty years by then.
Granny lived in a tall house in Lavenham, all of sixty miles away from home and baby. It was called ‘No. 99’, which somehow conferred singular honour upon it. The Late Mr Scoones had gone up in the world; he had been taken away from school at the age of fourteen because his father, a carrier, could not pay a farthing a week for his schooling. ‘A carrier’ – no doubt a euphemism of the time, like those chaps who turn up in criminal court nowadays describing themselves as ‘a company director’. The Late had eventually acquired one or two houses, none quite as grand or quite as semi-detached as No. 99, and become Chairman of the local Budgerigar Breeders and Fanciers Association. He had left behind a great deal of solid furniture, very fashionable with the aspiring classes in the eighteen-nineties, covered all over with carving and scrolling, dotted with tiny shelves, and seeded with mirrors wherever possible. It was all mahogany, of course. The Late Mr Scoones was not the man to venture into oak.
The toilet on the first landing conformed to the same pattern, with a fine high mahogany seat, the moving parts activated by a lever to one side, rather reminiscent of today’s ejector seat in fighter planes.
The bathroom, too, had its share of mahogany. The mahogany ran up and around the wash basin, embraced the big misty mirror set too high for me to see into, and completely encircled the enormous bath, as if wood had developed the temperament of bindweed. The bath had a point in its favour. When allowing water to escape, it emitted a disgusting gargling noise which always made me laugh. Since laughing, in chronic whooping cough cases, brings on vomiting, the purpose of the bath was often defeated.
I dwell on these details because I hated everything in the house with – well, not exactly a passionate intensity, but certainly with all the intensity a whelp of that age could bring to the subject. We always remember best what we hate best. Also, in my desperate case, the toilet and bathroom were the rooms to which I was dragged when my illness came on. I had no ordinary whooping cough, like the poor kids down Baxter Row, who always had something so appalling that it’s a wonder the working classes of Nettlesham didn’t die out in that generation; I had whooping cough with complications. The complications, I realized later, much later, sprang from the bilious attacks which came on whenever something brought to my attention the fact that Mater was so pissed off at having me. A lot of sicking up went on at No. 99, I’m proud to say, and the mahogany took quite a hammering.
In order to cure or at least quieten me, my granny’s doctor, a tall sallow man with side whiskers, carrying a bag, and dressed in even blacker black than granny’s, and called Dr Humphreys-Menzies – oh, you won’t believe it, you’ll think I’m getting this out of an old bound volume of Punch – Dr Humphreys-Menzies came along and prescribed a medicine of noxious stickiness which was to be taken last thing at night. Probably a mix of laudanum plus cow gum and masses of sugar to taste. I’m certainly right about the sugar, for in no time the mixture had rotted away all my milk teeth. The teeth went brown and green and began to waver in their sockets, like old men trying to keep awake in their pews during the sermon on Sundays. Out they had to come, ha-ha, something else we can do to the little bastard.
I was wheeled down to the dentist in my pyjamas, given chloroform (now reserved for laboratory rats), and twelve of the defective little pegs were whipped out. By the time I came groggily round, the teeth were arranged in a pattern for me to see on a sort of white glass ashtray. Then it was back to No. 99 and bed, and a good bleed over the sheets.
It is not my intention to depict myself as feeble. In fact I was a sturdy kid, give or take a mother or two, well up on the tree-climbing and swift-kick-to-the-bum-of-enemies. It’s a tribute to that sturdiness that by four-thirty on the Day of the Great Extraction I was thoroughly awake again, crying aloud for fish warmed in milk, blancmange, and liquorice sticks, and sicking freely over granny’s eiderdown.
At last something or other happened. Probably granny refused to keep me any longer, and I was shoved off home. Oh dear, did I weep when I was again in my mother’s arms? Oh dear, I did, as far as that was congenial to the little swaddled thing also entangled in the embrace. Siblings? I was well and truly sibbled.
I returned home to my parents on a Wednesday. They couldn’t make it on Tuesday, Tuesday being the weekly whist drive over at Mrs Poncer’s, as well as (for Pater) the meeting of the Nettlesham Westlake Cultural Society, when no doubt they were giving a public reading of the poems of Baden-Powell.
Anyone well up in amateur psychiatry or do-it-yourself psychoanalysis will recognize that this was danger time for little wowser. Any clued-in Mater in nineteen-thirty-one would have known that this was crunch time, when little wowser, if he was ever to recover from his psychic shock of displacement, would need special treatment (loving being an outword) for the next week or two; or say even a calendar month. When his poor broken heart might be sutured. What he would not need was an angry shoving aside when two great luxurious tits were brought out for the tiny red-faced one to guzzle at for a half-hour on the trot. That was piling Pelion on the gingerbread, tantamount to inviting him to jump from the frying pan into the Ossa.
If a small child becomes lonely, moody, given to picking his nose, prone to attention-seeking tantrums and periods of withdrawal such as hiding in the wardrobe with Teddy, the signs are there to be read. Mother beware, Father be there. True, in my case, the signs were read, and I was given a good clout for seeking attention. Somehow, it had to be made clear to me that it just wasn’t my world any longer and I’d be well-advised to get on with my cigarette card collection and not vex Mater. And when I did in fact withdraw into an invisible shell and shuffle and re-shuffle my Fifty Famous Cricketers, then it had to be made clear that I was not to sulk.
It was made sufficiently clear for my behaviour to become more rather than less bizarre. The tree-climbing reached, in every sense, new heights. It was fun to reach a really impossibly high twig and then hang from it, screaming at the top of my voice that I was falling. That did get attention, though it was surely worth a few more laughs than it earned.
So the puzzle was what to do with such a naughty child. And the solution arrived at, after much heart-searching but little consultation with anyone with any fucking sense, was to scare small wowser into submission. Accordingly, at the next lark, wowser was told that Mater would never love him again. Bilious attack followed. No dice. Bed wetting. No dice. Rather the opposite. Minus dice. More threats. If he was going to be naughty, then Mater would run away from him, taking Baby Ellen with her. Oh, no, mummy, please don’t leave me! – Ah ha, fatal thing to say, showing what you were really afraid of! Now she had you, vulnerable little rat that you were …
So we come to the central scene of the narrative. The torture scene. It is for this that I sit up late at night, a rug round my legs against the cold, scribbling – just to draw this picture. It happened over half a century ago, yet it remains vivid, vivid as shame, and blood still runs in the gutters.
At that naughty boy’s next outburst of misery, Mater was off. She carried out her dreadful threat. Baby Ellie was crammed helpless into her pushchair, wool bonnet was tied under her pink little chops. Arms flying, she was bowled up Ipswich Street, Mater propelling her with maniacal force. I swear that’s what she did, doctor. I can prove it. I saw her from our front windows, watched her in despair, my own and only mother, doctor, off almost at a trot in her brown coat, never see her again, never …
Okay, that’s it. Lash the strait-jacket back on now. I’ve told it.
You hear? She actually deserted me. Ran away. She took my little sister – an innocent accomplice – and she ran away from me up Ipswich Street because she hated me so much. What a crime was committed that day!
Okay, it was a bluff. I know it was a bluff. But I’m sure that my learned and aloof brother would tell you that Mater was acting out her secret desires. It was only a bluff, and she sneaked back in again before dark, so that Pater didn’t discover what she had done … That makes no difference. A little distinction cuts no ice with a four-year-old. She had bloody left home, carried out her miserable threat to leave me. Come in, Jung, come in, Freud, come in, Dr Spock. You hear what I said? I said my bloody Mater ran away from me, deserted me. I died that day.
They resurrected me next morning. No matter that I had no spirit for anything. The ghastly routines of childhood had to be undergone. There remained the rituals of nutrition, exercise, and neglect. Soon there was infant school. Dead or not, one had to attend. Had to learn to tie bootlaces, had to learn the two-times table, even if to all intents and purposes emotionally extinct.
My fruitless struggles to regain my mother’s affections shall not be told, ever. To cut a long throat short, I continued to be nothing but a terrible nuisance to my parents. Since they had no understanding, matters deteriorated. I wouldn’t share my toys with Baby, and it was no excuse that Baby, tottering about now like a new-hatched Behemoth, broke them. I was a Bad Boy, and things happen to Bad Boys. Mater again ran away. It was no less impressive than the first time. She did not at all like it when she returned to find urine under the window sill where I had kneeled trembling to watch her go, where I had collapsed when she had disappeared. She must have felt it was an unfair reward for criminal desertion.
So the months rolled by like poison down the sink. Parents came to a decision. He must go away to school. ‘Right away to school’ was the actual phrase. He must go to a place where – this was the next phrase – they would make a little Gentleman out of him. (What ambitions the sellers of buckets harbour in their breasts!) They would make a little Gentleman out of him. Knock the shit out of him, in other words. Not forgetting the piss. And, of course, the sick. And anything else they could find.
Need I say that I was never consulted about this fearful expulsion from the nest, from my first Eden? Even prayer was not used in this instance; no more of the getting down on swollen knees. Keep God out of it. Let the crime be as secret as possible.
Of course Pater knew. He was going to have to pay the bills. But Pater kept aloof, down among his pails and coconut matting, presumably having decided that the intimate dramas of the nest were not to his taste. He distanced himself as far as possible from the squalid bawlings of his son (elder son but, note, not first-born – more of that later), his daughter, and then his second son, as each in turn arrived in this vale of tears. Indeed, throughout the patchy growth of his children, he managed still to stay pained and aloof, relaying such orders as we needed to receive through his wife. She was his mouthpiece. To put it another way, and more effectively, since it mirrors more faithfully the lousy English class system, he was the commanding officer; she was the NCO. Orders were passed down the line to us children, the privates, the conscripts, who were supposed to carry them out without question.
Thus, as we grew, Mater’s sentences more and more tended to begin with the words, ‘Your father says …’ They generally spelt doom. The tablets came down from the mountain, wanged with considerable force.
There was some delay in finding an appropriate school for me. None of them was cheap enough. Ironmongers were not made of money. Eventually an establishment was found on a dreary stretch of the Suffolk coast, tucked away from human eyes at the end of a lane in a position forlorn enough to satisfy the most pernickety psychopath.
Father tramped round the premises with the headmaster. This was called ‘looking the school over’. I was dragged behind them, noting the high walls which surrounded the school. To one side was a field where cricket was played. In the stone wall at the rear of the building was a tall wooden gate. The headmaster flung open this gate with a gesture.
‘The sea’s just there,’ he said. We could hear the waves scribbling on pebble, not a hundred yards distant.
My father looked down at me. ‘I hope you teach the boys swimming,’ he said.
With a kind of cringing geniality to which I would become accustomed over the next few years, the headmaster replied, ‘At St Paul’s, we go in the sea whatever the weather’s like …’
The two men eyed each other. They were big men, in sympathy with each other’s thought processes.
‘Sink or swim, eh?’ said my father, and they both laughed.
As well they might. My father had just uttered the school motto.
10
And so I found myself, helpless, with a little kaleidoscope in one pocket, shaking so much that my socks would not stay up over my calves, not weeping even when I kissed little Ellen goodbye, teddy bear suddenly wrenched from my embrace as the car stopped at the gates, a vulnerable seven, installed as one of sixteen young boarders attending Mr Humphrey Fangby’s St Paul’s Court Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen and Obdurate Little Bastards (Equestrian Lessons Extra).
My parents’ farewells still rang lovingly in my ears: ‘Your father says Work Hard.’
My salvation, if it was to be had at all, was to be had at the hands of my companions, the bedraggled fifteen. I cannot say that I came to any harm from them, or they from me, I hope. There was no compassion between us; they were also having a bad time. But a kind of loyalty in adversity did develop between us, and some I grew slowly to love and befriend. Yet even friendship, that most precious quality, was a sickly fruit under the shadow, the ample shadow, of Mr Humphrey Fangby. Let’s call the old bastard that.
Fangby was a tall, portly man, imposing if slugs are imposing, with thick wisps of black hair drawn across a dome of bone, a convalescent’s fleshy nose ending in a downward sneer, mottled cheeks, and two little eyes like sucked buttons, well suited for detecting lies or happiness in those placed under his care. He wore suits of a ginger bristly material, possibly woven from the pubic hair of Bactrian camels.
Fangby had a Fangby Wife, a pallid little person who occasionally smiled through the dining room hatch at us in a manner indicating that she had been instructed never to say a kindly word to us, on threat of immediate fornication. As to this latter, there had emerged into the world a Fangby Baby. It also never said a kindly word to us. Fangby Baby’s only contribution to our welfare at St Paul’s was to permit its old huckaback napkins to be used as towels to dry our washing-up. None of our plans to kidnap it came to anything.
Food was of the worst sort. When visitors from abroad complain about the awfulness of English food, the disgusting state of our restaurants, the insolence of our waiters, and the revolting habits of the other (English) diners, I long to take them back in a time machine to St Paul’s, to show them where it all began. Our provisions, poor to awful to start with, were cooked by Fangby himself.
Perhaps to persuade himself that he was a good cook, Fangby had imposed a rule upon us: every plateful had to be cleared completely, however long it took. Nothing was to be wasted, not even the most gristly piece of meat. St Paul’s fish had gristle too. And the blancmange. Much vomiting went on before we got some especially inedible dish down. Sago would be top of my horror list, perhaps because it reminded one visually of the vomiting that would have to be endured before it all vanished. Fortunately, dining room and lavatory were adjoining. One could be smelt from the other.
Cuisine of course is not the strong point of schools. One goes there to learn, not to eat. Eating is incidental. It is Learning that maketh Gentlemen. Why am I saying this? That’s what Fangby taught, so obviously the poison seeped in. Learning doth not make Gentlemen. All it could possibly make at St Paul’s, to put things at their unlikely best, was to turn out snotty little trumped-up sons of small tradesmen. Only Gentlemen make Gentlemen. It’s
a closed shop. You need inherited money, lawns down to lakes, Paters in Who’s Who, horses in the paddock, friendships with judges, and a fucking blasé accent to be a Gentleman. You also need to steer clear of St Paul’s, where a notice in the sports field made it plain that it was a Preparatory School, without clarifying what exactly it might be preparing you for. Not Eton and Harrow, that’s for sure.
Nowadays, there are inspectors to see that the Fangbys of this world are denied permission to run schools. Together with Fangby Wives, they run boarding houses and B&Bs instead, from which punters can flee in horror after a one-night stay. No twelve-week terms are imposed.
Of course I’m talking about the mid-thirties, before the war, during the days of the British Empire, when there was a kind of official unspoken consensus that miserable conditions in childhood made the best troops in wartime. It was good thinking on the War Office’s part (or whoever it was that planned on such clever lines) – proved to be perfectly correct when the war broke out in 1939. After a dose of Fangby’s regime for a few years, it was a positive relief to fling yourself on a German bayonet.
Learning was in the capable if oily hands of whom but Mr Fangby himself. Assisted by two masters, Mr Fletcher and the Rev. Winterbottom. Mr Fletcher was the only master to live in. He taught everything and did everything, and all for a pound a week plus lodging, I’m sure. But being an object of pity is not the same as being a pleasant character; and so it was in Mr Fletcher’s case. He took out on the boys all that he hated about Fangby, and was ever ready with a sneer and a crushing witticism. Of the ‘You didn’t stand very near your hairbrush this morning’ variety.
The Rev. Winterbottom was hardly a teacher at all. He was the local C. of E. minister, as pious as they come, and with a veneer of culture gained, I suppose, from fraternizing on a compulsory basis with the local squirearchy. His two boys, Gregory and Hilary Winterbottom, were boarders, and doubtless got in cheap in exchange for Rev. Winterbottom’s conducting us through the pieties every Saturday morning. He was a conscientious man, and kindly, and we became all too familiar with the buggerings about of the Israelites in the Wilderness. What on earth was it regarding those wandering tribes which made Winterbottom, never mind God, so interested in them in the first place? I soon had their watering places, and the dumps where father was prepared to cut son’s throat (I liked that bit) off by heart. I knew everything from Genesis to about Judges. I could tell you who smote whom at Gibeon. Take your average kid of the streets today and ask him before he hits you where a place called Bashan is, or what was built of shittim wood, and he’ll look blank. It’s the Top Twenty or nothing for him. Not an inkling of old Moab the Tishbite or the Hittites. (‘Is that a Group, mate?’)