Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘It’s not yours, it’s mine, ’cos I’ve got it,’ said Sonia, with some logic. ‘So for that I’ll only give you twopence.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’

  ‘And if you don’t shut up, you’ll only get a penny, so there.’

  The snakes came in two kinds. One form of snake emerged from a volcano. The volcano was very small and encased in green ‘silver paper’. It stood on a circular cardboard base. When the peak of the volcano was lit, little green flecks, closely resembling grass, poured from it, covering the base. Finally, the snake emerged, writhing realistically as it came. It was thin but, with what seemed like evil intent, it crossed the grass as if to attack. Then, mercifully, it froze.

  Sonia and you were enraptured. But Joan Pie said, contemptuously, ‘It didn’t do much.’

  ‘It would have bitten you if it could,’ you told her.

  ‘Stephen!’ Martin said, reprovingly. ‘You be nice to Joan or you’ll go up to your room.’

  The other kind of snake was bigger and more terrifying. That was why you liked it better than the grass snake.

  This snake, possibly a python, was concealed in a small, black top hat. This Christmas, Martin had discovered a cardboard box full of the little top hats, left over from the previous year by the last tenant of the flat. You clapped your hands with excitement at the sight of so many hats.

  ‘How Valerie would have loved them,’ Mary exclaimed wistfully.

  Your father set one of them on the table near the grass snake, struck a match and tried to light it. The hat would not burn. Martin burnt his finger instead, and swore.

  ‘Try another match, daddy,’ shouted Sonia, full of anticipation.

  He struck another one, but it also failed to ignite the hat, and again he burnt his finger.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Martin,’ Mary said. ‘You can see they’re old and damp. You’ll only burn yourself.’

  Perhaps he was annoyed to be called daft. He took the box of top hats and flung it onto the coal fire, which heated his end of the room. You and Sonia groaned your disappointment. Joan Pie stuck her tongue out at you both, enjoying your dismay. But the box caught fire. The next minute, a dozen huge black pythons came uncoiling out of the fire and across the hearth to the carpet. What a sight! Sonia gave a yelp of delight. Joan Pie ran from the room, howling with fear.

  What a sight! What a triumph!

  Your father seemed always to be standing, holding forth in those days, despite his bad leg. He was a big man, generally to be seen in a tight-fitting Aertex shirt. He had a broad face and steely eyes. His lips were generally compressed, as if with anger against the injustices of the world.

  You remembered an occasion when your parents had been having what you thought of as ‘a cold row’. Few words were spoken during their cold rows, but there was plenty of body language, of glaring of eyes and turning of backs. Your father had said, ill-advisedly, that his Socialist principles had been formed because he was shocked to find families like his wife’s in penury.

  ‘The Wilberforces’ lot was much more humble than the Fieldings’,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Mary protested, stiff of face. She liked to think she came from ‘respectable stock’. ‘We weren’t too badly off. When I was fifteen Dad had an indoor lavvy tacked on.’

  A recital of your antecedents made you dizzy. It seemed to you that these dead people all became middle-aged shortly after their thirtieth birthdays, that they died in their fifties or sixties, and that they were poor in ways forgotten in the more prosperous present – your present.

  ‘Take your mother’s family,’ Martin said, directing his words at you and glaring through you into the past. ‘Zachariah Frost was grandfather to your grandfather. Where he came from, heaven knows, but his parents must have been extremely poor, since the story has come down that they had to remove Zachariah from school because they were unable to provide the halfpenny a week required to keep him there.

  ‘A ha’penny! Think of that, Stephen!’ He shot a corrective glance at you, huddled in an armchair with a comic.

  You thought of it. You knew ha’pennies. They had the last king’s head on one side of them and a sailing ship on the other. Those coins were often worn thin with usage, having passed through innumerable pockets.

  ‘Zachariah became a cobbler,’ Martin continued. ‘He married one Jane Wilberforce. They lived in a small house in Brick Street, Newbury. Although she was a scraggy little thing, by all accounts, they produced two girls and two boys. The kids were brought up on jam butties. They were all Baptists – Buttie Baptists – and went to chapel every Sunday.’

  ‘They were always religious,’ Mary said, defensively. She was making a cloth cover in which to keep the week’s Radio Times.

  ‘One of those girls died aged three. A common fate in those days. Rickets, probably.’

  ‘We used to have soap flakes called Ricketts,’ your mother exclaimed, unable not to enjoy talk of the old days, despite the offence she had taken. Your father ignored her remark.

  ‘Then the other girl, Hettie, her name was, she ran off with a foreigner and went to the Continent and was never heard of again.’

  ‘I ’spec she wanted to escape the family,’ said Sonia.

  ‘Getting above herself, more like,’ said Mary. ‘The Continent! Of all places! Fancy!’

  Father remarked in an aside that Paris must have been better than Portsmouth.

  ‘One of Zachariah’s boys was known as “Flash Harry”. They say in the family that Flash Harry seduced the vicar’s daughter. In any case, he went to fight the Boers and died in some horrible spot of Africa.

  ‘The other Frost brother got a job in Utterson’s, the hardware merchant. His name was Ernie, Ernie Frost. You picture him and his like in rough black suits, wearing caps when out on the street, where most of the lads like him spent much of their spare time.’

  ‘Why was that?’ you asked. You failed to see the attraction of streets.

  He shrugged. ‘Where else could they go in those days? Besides, the houses were so pokey –’

  Ernie had the urge to improve himself. He rejected his surname, Frost, on the grounds that it was unappealing. He changed his name by deed poll to his mother’s maiden name of Wilberforce. It was a rejection of all that cobbling and grubbing for the last farthing.

  ‘Next, Ernie took up the banjo. He hired himself out to sing and play at parties. He had no wish to live forever in the back streets with a shared thunderbox. He had a daguerreotype taken of himself in a straw boater, strumming the banjo. Your mother can show it you. He must have been quite a lad, young Ernie. Leaving Utterson’s at the age of nineteen, he became the delivery man for Ross, the big Newbury grocer. He worked hard and was reliable. Pretty soon, he was driving about in a pony and trap, delivering the groceries to the better houses of the district.

  ‘That was how he met the young lady who played the organ at the Baptist chapel in Brink, just outside Newbury. Her name was Sarah Ream. She was a shy lass, though not without spirit, and she couldn’t resist Ernie’s charm and jollity. He coaxed Sarah to play piano accompaniment while he strummed the banjo and sang.’

  ‘Oh, and they say that my mother never went near the chapel again,’ Mary interposed, caught somewhere between shame and pride.

  ‘Anyhow, Ernie and Sarah became a duo, quite stylish! The duo became quite fashionable. He wrote a song entitled I Stand and Play My Banjo in the Strand. It was printed as sheet music, and was very popular for a time.’

  Your father sang, looking genial.

  ‘The girls all fall for me

  They ask me home for tea,

  They think I’m grand.

  They didn’t ought to risk it

  ’Cos they know I take the biscuit

  When I stand and play me banjo in the Strand,

  Hey ho! I stand and play me banjo in the Strand.’

  Sonia clapped the performance. Mary looked pleased and said she loved that old song.

  �
�Ernie and Sarah got married and went to live in 33, Park Road. Although Ernie had no “background”, as people used to say, his ease of manner served him well. With the help of local Baptists, he soon acquired four houses in Park Road. He became a man of substance and was appointed secretary of the local Baptist Church. He was never afraid of work, was Ernie. Sarah became director of the local Waifs and Strays House –’

  So there you were, the fatal family four of you, in the cramped room. A light fitting hung centrally overhead, like the God in which you all more or less believed at that period. It was the only light in the room. On a side table stood the wireless, the only wireless in the house. A coal fire burned in the grate. On the mat in front of the grate lay a rug, and on that rug centrally stood your father, holding forth, as fathers did in those days, before they were deposed.

  ‘Sarah and Ernie produced five children: first of all three boys, and then two girls, of which your dear Mother was the last to be born.’

  Martin cast Mary an affectionate, if patronizing, glance as he mentioned her. The cold row was over.

  ‘You can imagine that Ernie’s increasing prosperity was shared by many of the lower classes at that time. Only four of your generations ago, Steve, listen to this, most people in England lived the sort of life Zachariah Frost lived; ill-educated, hand-to-mouth, having too many kids, dying young. Change since then has been incalculable, mainly thanks to the rise of Socialism.’

  Socialism always backed science.

  ‘These three Frost, or Wilberforce, sons formed an architectural partnership. Things were looking up. The town itself was expanding. The partnership built many of the rows of houses in which a new generation of engineers and artisans and other workers lived. It’s all in the records. The sons all married young. They needed wives for social purposes. You’ll remember your Uncle Jeremy and Auntie Flo’s little house, with its cheerful geranium window boxes?’

  You did remember it. Uncle Jeremy’s house was full of heavy furniture. The rooms smelt of mothballs. Sombre engravings of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and similar improving subjects hung on the walls in heavy frames. Jeremy and Flo employed a little servant girl called Ann.

  When you were taken visiting to the house, you used to run off to see Ann. She lived in the gloomy rear of the house until called. Ann was nice to you. Ann would even do a cute little dance for you. Ann was of obscure origin, probably illegitimate. She was quick and ardent, always smiling. What secret sorrows were hers you never knew. Nor did her employers enquire. Many feelings natural to earlier generations were necessarily repressed in the name of progress. When Ann finally climbed, late at night, to her tiny cabin in the attic, no one knew or thought to know what eternities of hope or disappointment she underwent there.

  ‘Then the war came,’ Martin went on, although this was on another occasion, just after your pet rabbit died. ‘1914. I’ll never forget the date. August 1914. It was royalty brought the war about. The blinking Crowned Heads of Europe! The war gradually ground into action, swallowing up young men all over Europe and far beyond. Among those cast into the maw of this monster were the three brothers of the architectural partnership; your uncles, poor buggers.’

  ‘Martin!’ exclaimed Mary, reprovingly.

  ‘I said beggars. Off they bravely went – Bertie, Jeremy and Ernest, Sarah shedding motherly tears as she waved them off on the train.’

  ‘My poor mother! What she went through!’

  ‘Two of the lads were captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in an Oflag. The third one, Ernie – a handsome youth of twenty-one – stopped a bullet at Passchendaele and died on the spot.’

  ‘It was the Somme, of all places,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to know. He got shot in the Somme offensive. August 1916.’

  ‘The Somme,’ cried Sonia, bored with talk of war. ‘That was where I got my hunchback.’ She was sitting huddled in an armchair with Gyp, our Airedale, sprawling on her lap. Suddenly she threw Gyp off. ‘I’m going to have an operation to get it removed.’

  ‘Do stop that nonsense,’ your mother scolded her. ‘Valerie would never say anything like that.’

  The dog sat and scratched himself, staring at Sonia with a look of amazement. Everyone was amazed by Sonia.

  Martin pressed grimly on with his account.

  ‘They say Ernie fell face down in the mud, was trampled over, got buried in it – never to play his banjo in the Strand again. Sarah, his widow, never remarried, poor lass.’

  ‘She set up a teashop with a lady companion. It stood on what’s now the Southampton Road,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie and I often used to go there in the old days.’

  ‘The other two brothers, Bert and Jeremy, returned unharmed at the end of the war. Jeremy rejoined his Flo – her folks were no one much – and Bertie married Violet from Grantham, a member of the smart Parkins family. The Parkinses manufactured the latest thing in lawnmowers for the upwardly mobile generations. Violet is a bit of a goer – I’d say out of Bertie’s class.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t trust Violet further than I could throw her!’

  Contemplating the idea of anyone throwing any aunties anywhere, Sonia burst into laughter. Her mother hushed her.

  ‘Any road, at Violet’s prompting, Bertie ceased to pursue his architectural career. He became instead a stunt pilot. Violet thought that was much more glamorous. He flew with Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Display, touring the country and delighting audiences with his daring. Jeremy remained with the architectural business, sole owner. Bedazzled by his young wife, skittish Flo, he began to neglect his work. Gradually the business went downhill. Bertie finally gave up his flying and joined the sinking business. He and Jeremy built that little Baptist chapel down Greenacres Road.’

  You imagined that old Zachariah Frost was a refugee from some starving stretch of the country, where life for the poor was even harder than life in the towns. Sonia drew a picture of him in crayon: a terrible old man with a big, hook nose and a hump on his back. Martin snatched up the paper and was furious at what he saw.

  ‘You should show some respect, girl!’

  Sonia jumped up, stamping her foot. She grabbed the paper back.

  ‘It’s me! It’s not him! It’s me, dressed up. Mind your own business.’

  You would never have dared speak to your father like that. It would have provoked a beating.

  ‘We’ve never had hunchbacks in our family,’ Martin said. He enjoyed telling you and your sister about the family history. You listened more passively than Sonia. But you, like her, were obsessed with your appearance. Shutting yourself in your north-facing bedroom, you would stare at your face in the looking glass. Eyes of an indeterminate colour. But were you not rather aristocratic, by and large? Possibly lantern-jawed? What was a lantern jaw? Did it shine like a lantern? Lantern-jawed. You spent hours practising being lantern-jawed, walking round the room being lantern-jawed.

  And still your father did his best to educate you in family history.

  ‘We Fieldings became more prosperous earlier than did the Frosts,’ Martin said. ‘In the parish records, William Fielding comes into the picture with dates attached. Born in the eighteen-forties. His wife Isabelle – Isabelle Doughty, she was – was from the superior Norfolk family of Doughtys. Isabelle bore William seven children, no less. William himself was one of nine children, two of whom were daughters. Two of William’s brothers died at sea.’

  ‘We still have a record somewhere of the death of one of the brothers, James. James Fielding was Chief Petty Officer of the ship Montgomery. He died of a fever off the Grand Banks, aged twenty-five. A fine young man. His body was committed to the deep.’

  Your father spoke these last words in a deep voice, as if to convey the depth of the ocean involved.

  ‘What are the Grand Banks actually, Daddy?’ you asked.

  ‘Not the same as Barclay’s Bank.’ Perhaps he thought he had made a joke. ‘No, the Grand Banks are off Newfoundland, and covered perma
nently in fog.’

  ‘Did they push him over the side when he was dead?’ Sonia asked. It was the first time she had shown any real interest in the account.

  ‘His coffin was lowered over the side with all due reverence.’ Martin gave his Aertex shirt a tug, as if to demonstrate.

  ‘It may have been these deaths that persuaded William to settle in Swaffham and open a chemist’s shop instead of going to sea. One of his sons, my dad, your grandfather, Sydney Fielding, established a similar business in Horncastle. He combined a dentistry with his pharmacy. In Horncastle were born all of Sydney and Elizabeth’s children, one of them being none other than me, your father.’

  Your mother was quite a bit younger than your father.

  You feared him. He would beat you with a slipper even when you were small – say, two years old. After the beating, when your feelings were hurt as well as your behind, he would make you shake hands with him and declare that you were still friends. This you always did, fearing another beating if you didn’t, but you never ever felt he was your friend.

  ‘Never,’ you swore under your breath, accentuating the word by becoming momentarily lantern-jawed.

  When your father was not angry, he was morose. You remember watching him staring moodily out of your front window at the street. A little band of wounded ex-servicemen was playing there, with trumpet, tambourine and penny whistle. A cap lay on the pavement at their feet. The old soldiers could muster only five eyes and four legs between the three of them. You would often stand and look at them with a kind of puzzled sympathy, until they told you to clear off. Your father regarded them icily through the window. He had no patience for those who did not, or could not, work.

  ‘Bloody cripples,’ he said, catching you staring at him. He had to fight against being a cripple himself, with his painful leg. Such disabled soldiers fell outside his socialist sympathies for the working man.

  ‘Work’s the saviour, young feller-m’-lad,’ he told you. He often called you ‘young feller-m’-lad’, as if he could not quite remember your name. Perhaps he thought that a new breed of men would have to appear before wars ceased; men without the savagery that begot wars. You know he sometimes spoke to your mother of how the world could be redeemed. How God should send his Son down again, pretty promptly, and alter everything; yet his words were empty of any real sense of belief.