Forgotten Life

by Brian Aldiss

  Education has changed.

  Any good in that school was brought in by the boys – which tells you how little good there was. Toys were strictly disallowed, on the principle that they provided links with home. I was permitted to have with me my microscope and my telescope, on the grounds that they were something or other that toys were not. Perhaps Fangby thought that Gentlemen used such objects. Be that as it may, I was forever looking up or down brass barrels, and sketching what I saw. What I saw was completely divorced from St Paul’s, and therefore welcome and wonderful. My love of science and astronomy dates from that time. Had we been taught science it would have been a different story. But at that date, and previously, only men with left-wing attitudes were attracted to science, so Gentlemen would not touch it.

  What Gentlemen learnt were the Classics. Well, Greek was beyond us, but Fangby saw to it that we got a dose of Latin. There in our classroom we sat, learning to conjugate amo, learning to decline mensa. Thus the first sentence we ever put together in the tongue of those scoundrelly Romans was ‘I love a table’. It was necessary that our sex lives should be warped if we were to go forth and Command, like real Gentlemen.

  Fortunately the intended discipline was too insane to be methodically applied. For all his vices, it could be said in Fangby’s defence that he was a lazy man. He was given to entering the classroom in the morning with an extra smarmy smile over large areas of his face and saying, ‘Well, boys, you’ve been working so well that I am going to give you a day’s holiday.’

  It was forbidden to groan. A holiday meant that we were kicked out of the house into the field until dusk, while Fangby hit the sack, presumably with Fangby Wife – who for that reason probably dreaded holidays as much as we did.

  There was nothing to do in the field but sit about and bully each other, or fight off the local boys. The village boys, who knew potential little Gents when they saw them, hated us effortlessly and with true instinct. Since most of them were about fifteen, and hulking with it, and our average age was ten, we were correct to fear them. The first we would know of them was when stones came whizzing through the hawthorn hedge at us – or it would have been the first had they not worn boots shod like horses’ hooves and talked in husky whispers audible half a mile off. Many of us had our foreheads cut open by stones (‘I must have banged it on the apple tree, Mrs Fangby …’). Class warfare begins young.

  One other resource was open to us. We were allowed a small strip of field, next to an old hewn-flint wall, to make into gardens. These we worked on quite consistently with the aid of Slaves (boys feeble and consequently gardenless). Fine patches of land they became, every last stone being set carefully aside as ammunition for when the Goths next attacked through the hedge.

  Once a week, we were allowed into Miss Araminta’s shop, a hundred yards away from the school gates, down the lane. This miserable concession to freedom was always under threat and often withdrawn if a sin was committed (such as dropping a pen in class, which counted about Eight on the local Richter scale). Miss Araminta, oleaginous enough to be indisputably in cahoots with Fangby, sold everything including black knicker elastic at a farthing a yard. To us she sold Carter’s Tested Garden Seeds and penny Milky Way bars, which in those days included Radio Stars (A Set of 25).

  We sowed our gardens with seeds bought with our own hard unearned pocket money. If the seeds were sown in the spring term and the plot weeded scrupulously for every last minuscule weed (more work for the Slave) in the last week of term, then when we returned (groan) for our summer incarceration, the carrots, spring onions, lettuce, and radish would be up and doing well.

  Our enforced days’ holidays were punctuated by either Fangby Wife or Fangby Bootboy coming out with a battered toffee tin full of sandwiches. Lunch. We would fling the gristly old meat over the hedge, lay a young spring onion or a leaf or two of lettuce between the bread, and eat and enjoy. Thus we retained some independence from the Regime.

  My feelings for the earth and the goodness of its fruits, not to mention its vegetables, date from that time. Earth gives you things you can actually eat without being sick. It is a miracle for which we should all be grateful. Pity that no more than sixteen boarders went to St Paul’s.

  The dreadful years passed. Mr Fletcher was sacked for drunkenness and some wept to see him leave through the school gates. The Rev. Winterbottom left us, to be replaced by a Roman Catholic priest with bad breath called Father Chitterling, also well informed on what the Israelites got up to and why. One of our number, a boy we called Old Boghound for reasons long forgotten, came back at the beginning of term with news – rather garbled news – of how children were made and born. His sister had told him. Eggs came into it and it all sounded pretty disgusting. We gave Old Boghound six with his own cricket bat.

  Beatings meant little to us, at bottom. Until my last term. One of our number, a large lad called Crouch, who looked like a neatly shaven dromedary, committed an Unforgivable Act. He was immediately expelled. Fangby locked him in a small attic room until his parents could collect him. His clothes were taken away.

  We were lectured about this Act, which, we were told, would incur immediate beating and sacking if we perpetrated it. This was alarming and unenlightening, since the Act was never named. It was too terrible to be named. Had Crouch devised for himself the art of masturbation, only to be discovered when at the short sharp stroke stage? Had he been caught puffing at cigarettes? Had he seized on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rape the Fangby Baby? Had he farted within ear-and nose-shot of Fangby Wife? We were never told, and I still keep hoping to come across old Crouch in some far Salvation Army shelter and get the truth from the horse’s mouth. The mystery of his Act increased the atmosphere of terror which prevailed.

  Crouch was paraded before us the following day, in pyjamas, accompanied by a very grim and dropsical-looking Fangby holding a cricket stump. The classroom door was locked. Some of our number, sensing blood, asked immediately to Be Excused. Permission was not granted: we were to stay as assembled, to see that justice was done.

  Fangby then proceeded to give Crouch twelve blows with the cricket stump on his bare bum. Everyone went deathly pale. Each whack brought a fall in the communal blood pressure. Two boys fainted, another we called the Mouse was sick on the floor. It showed there was good in us. Crouch never made a sound, but had to be helped from the room when the beating was over. It was little consolation to think that similar events had taken place in the Navy in Nelson’s day. The sinner left St Paul’s before sunset, and was presumably doomed from then on. Perhaps he died for England in the war then only three years away.

  Whatever Crouch’s crime, Fangby’s was greater. Strange though it may be to admit such a thing, I had not until the flogging hated Fangby. There was something about his manner, a suspicion of fawning, a hangdog look which came over him, a droop in his shoulders, even a suspicion of apology on occasions when he addressed his little victims, which I found disarming. He was a soft-spoken man. Unlike Mr Fletcher, he did not use the whip of sarcasm on us. Perhaps in some fashion the monster was sorry for the way in which he earned his living. Perhaps – who knows – he too aspired to be a Gentleman.

  The brutal flogging elevated him to a different category. He was now the enemy. He had demonstrated how Gentlemen were made – by Fear.

  A gulf opened between the teachers and the taught. It was revealed to us as we cowered in our classroom after Crouch had been dragged away that a great division in the world lay between those who had power and those upon whom power was exercised. From now on, and for the rest of our lives, it was to be Us and Them. The Us was rather a solitary role.

  The Them were multitudinous.

  You may imagine that I was happy to leave St Paul’s. You may, but it would not be true. For my parents, ever tender for my welfare, had put my name down for a much larger school, Tremblingham College, which boasted four hundred boys. Since St Paul’s never boasted more than twenty, including day kids, the chances of bullyin
g at Tremblingham might be reckoned at twenty times more likely.

  I never adjusted to Tremblingham. It proved to be much like a larger scale St Paul’s without the laughs. Perhaps I would have done better if I had not felt I was being sent away as a punishment, as part of what amounted to a continued policy of not loving me. That feeling persisted throughout my school days, being now and then reinforced by one or other incident which showed I was not just imagining things.

  While the pitiful round of school term, recovering from the last school term, and preparing oneself psychologically for the next school term, was in full swing, much was going on elsewhere.

  The female Winter baby, first seen in these pages red-faced and supping milk, had by now grown up considerably, to the extent of running about and being able to bark like a dog when requested to do so. She had a name: Ellen Mary. She proved to be good value. Whereas I had been reduced to a dreadful lickspittle, hanging around to do anything my parents suggested in order to avoid even more severe punishment (The Hulks? The Inquisition? The Bar?), Ellen, confident of inexhaustible mother’s love, was a rebellious little spark, and an increasingly stalwart ally.

  The sense of alliance grew when Mater again began to have swollen knees, to wear looser clothes, and to rest even longer in the afternoons. There was an impression that pink bootees were being knitted, new maids engaged, and new cans of powder lined up on the bathroom shelf. I knew these ominous signs of old. Though still blind to the finer points of reproduction, I sensed that another member of the family impended. And the treacherous thought came – it was going to be yet another little girl.

  When this suspicion was conveyed to the first little girl, she was furious. Ellie was certainly not having a sister in the house. She’d rather have a big white dog, like Mrs Ravage’s. She began to play up in preparation for the event. I was flabbergasted at this show of spirit, which would certainly have involved me in another walk-out up Ipswich Street. Behind my invincible aura of non-confidence, I trembled when the bedclothes were flung on the fire, and when the bottle of Friars Balsam was hurled out of the window, followed defiantly by a new tube of Colgate’s Toothpaste. What powers of self-expression this sister had!

  Alas, not even a new toothpaste tube can check the onward march of the fallopian tubes. Again the nurse dominated the house, all starched bosom and little pink nose, again the wailings of the newborn and the scent of meconia.

  I was transfixed. All the old misery of disgrace went into psychic re-run. Was I again to be whisked off to granny’s and lose another twelve teeth? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Ellen were exiled as well. We could have fun in the mahogany-bound bath that made do-dos noises, and Ellen would certainly give granny a run for her money.

  A maid brought us the joyous news. It was only a boy. I was saved. Good old God! Well played, Jesus! The parents would not get rid of me for a mere boy. I went back to Tremblingham with a relatively light heart. Ellen was furious, and at first refused to go to school. She had to be bought a little white dog – like Mrs Ravage’s but smaller – before she could be induced to venture farther than the front door-step.

  This new boy, soon christened Clement, marked a turning point in the relationship between Ellen and me. We now had something we both disliked. It brought us closer together – as close as we could get, considering that I kept having to go to school for two-thirds of the year.

  Rebellious boys are popular at school. Quiet boys are unpopular. Quietly rebellious boys are the most unpopular. I could see that once again Tremblingham was up to Fangby’s lark of trying to make us into Gentlemen – and with far better chances of success. So everything I did was against the grain, although I could not stop myself learning, since little else offered itself.

  War was brewing. Over in Hitler’s Germany, the smart money were beginning to pack. Meanwhile, we had our little battles on the home front.

  While relations with Mater could not be regarded as more than warm, with an occasional sunny period, father was a figure I admired from afar. He was all I hoped to be, and evidently as he himself hoped, a model son for his father, my authoritarian old grandad.

  He had his role in superior Nettlesham society.

  Both he and Mater had musical ability. Every Sunday, father played the organ in church. We entered solemnly into God’s temple, and nipped solemnly out of the same to the mighty strains he evoked. Evenings, he worked late in our shop, doing the orders. He did not smoke or gamble or drink. I never heard him swear. He was, however, a good man with a gun, won many prizes at shooting, and evidently had God’s okay to shoot rabbits and partridges and pheasants whenever they showed their faces in our part of Suffolk.

  His brother Hereward was completely different. Hereward cared nothing for church. Every Sunday, Hereward lay in late, recovering from the excesses of the night before. He smoked, drank and gambled. Gambling was a kind of passion with Hereward. He never worked late in the shop, and was over in Newmarket, betting on the gee-gees, as often as he could. I often used to think it must be more fun in Uncle Hereward’s and Aunt Hermione’s house than in ours, had it not been for their three mischievous sons, my cousins, Seneca, Setebos, and Cecil. These large indolent lads were good at football, blowing up frogs with straws, sliding on partly frozen ponds, and other sports for which there was much local competition. They bullied anyone smaller than they (like me) and howled vigorously when beaten. They were all red-faced, with a redness which varied throughout life from acne to high blood pressure. I hated them because they once made another kid and me toss them all off twice in quick succession behind a barn.

  Why had my father only one pale son plus little Clement, and Hereward three red-faced sons? It cannot have been just the luck of the draw. God must have had some excuse for making my father so short of male progeny and that progeny so inept at blowing up frogs with straws. The answer seems to be that he and Hereward related to their dread Pater, my grandad, much as Ellen and I did to Mater. Hereward always knew that whatever he did, however awful he and his sons were, he was sure of his Pater’s love; and my father, however good he was, however often he abstained from a pint or a drag on a Player’s, never could be sure that his Pater loved him.

  As I have revealed, my origins were humble. Not that I saw them as humble at the time. Indeed, I thought of them as a cut above most origins, and the family – whatever its other shortcomings – as prosperous.

  Grandad Winter’s was not any old ironmongery. It stood in the square of Nettlesham right next to the Westlake Memorial Hall. Father said it was the biggest ironmongery business, almost, in the country; which is to say that it may have been the thirty-first biggest. Anyhow, we sold a lot of galvanized pails, I can tell you.

  These were the very pails I mentioned as ringing in the new life, my life. Their harmonies, less reckonable than a peal of bells, were awoken by my father’s reception of the news of the birth of his first son upstairs. He was at the time adjusting a price ticket saying Unrepeatable: 1/1½d. each: Bargain, when the news took him by as much surprise as if he had had no hand – or any other member – in the proceedings which precipitated my birth. He fell off the top of the steps on which he was balancing. Down he went. And with him went a dozen of the one shilling, one penny ha’penny pails, careering over the shop floor in great bucketfuls of sound, some actually rolling cheerfully out into the square. I was, you might say, into ironmongery from the very beginning. Nowadays they use the American term Hardware and done with it.

  Grandad ruled over this shop with a rod of wood, which he applied without hesitation to my bare legs if I got in the way of customers.

  He spent his days in a small office at the back. Its one window, not much more than a foot square, looked out on the brickwork of the side of the Westlake Memorial Hall. Wedged in with him was our cashier, Doris. In the front of the shop my father and his brother worked. Somehow father always got the dirty jobs and put up shutters, whereas it was Hereward who got to seduce the lovely Doris.

  I was n
ot popular in the shop. Things rattled when I went by. Nowhere was safe, nowhere was comfortable. Harsh surfaces threatened. On every side lurked stiff coconut matting, giant scrubbing brushes, blades of saws, bales of barbed wire, down to your humble emery paper. Fortunately, I was welcome in the shop next door, the little milliner’s and haberdasher’s run by Mrs Tippler and her two daughters, Rosemary and Ruth, among their soft goods.

  No harsh surfaces here. Mrs Tippler was delicate and refined; conscious of her unfortunate name, bequeathed by a gent either deceased or permanently living up to his name in the Conversation Arms, she never touched a drop. Her two daughters were all peachy surface, pretty and pink and refinedly dressed – and a barrow-load of mischief when Mumsy was not around. I loved Rosemary Tippler. I loved Ruth Tippler. And this was rather odd because when I was twelve Ruth was thirteen and Rosemary was eighteen – at least a generation or two older than I, as it seemed.