by Brian Aldiss
‘Ideal stuff, tubes, to make chairs out of. Chairs and tables. Modern chairs, chairs that will stack; the up-and-coming thing. I own a factory in Southampton. Ex-army chaps to work there. Woven canvas needed for seat and back. War surplus stuff. Very low cost. Considerable profits to be garnered, and that quickly.
‘My niece Abigail recommends you as a young man of probity. I need you to sign a contract here and now. You will help to keep those two young tearaways, Terry and Joey Hillman, in order.’
‘I don’t think I could manage that, Sir,’ you told him.
‘Nonsense. You’ve managed men. You were in the war and the boys weren’t. You’ve been, so to say, tempered in the flame. They’re afraid of you. Good businessmen, though. Ruthless, that’s what matters. They’ve got a system.’
He gestured towards your leg. ‘You’re walking with a slight limp. War wound? Better get it fixed. The Labourites are setting up Beveridge’s National Health Service, so you might get it done for nothing.’
You signed the contract. As you were pocketing your fountain pen, Lyndhurst leaned forward to say, ‘Of course, you know Claude Hillman? Father of these two lads?’
‘I do.’
‘A bit of a fabricator, one might say. Told me he owns a racehorse at Newmarket. I checked: he doesn’t.’
‘I am sorry to hear it.’
His lordship inclined his head. ‘I am reliably informed that you are related to Bertie Wilberforce, the architect – or an architect, should I say?’
Your reply was cautious. ‘Bertie Wilberforce is married to my Aunt Violet, yes.’
‘I know nothing about that. I do know the fellow did a poor job for me, building – or rather, one should say, rebuilding – the Methodist chapel in Southgate. Very shoddy workmanship; mortar fell apart after a year. Overcharged me, too.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Sir.’
‘Not half as sorry as I am.’
‘I understand that mortar is not what it used to be.’
‘Huh, nor are architects.’
You returned home to discover your father in his cricket togs, while your mother hovered excitedly around him.
‘I’m captain of the Scallywags, Stephen,’ he said proudly. ‘We’re about to play the Hamptonian Eleven. After this game I shall retire from the noble game. I’m forty-five and have more serious matters to attend to. This match happens to be a tradition, you see.’
‘I thought you’d be in the Commons,’ you said.
Martin narrowed his eyes, the better to observe his son. ‘Not today of all days. This is an annual struggle, stretches back over a century. But I may as well tell you I am doing a good responsible job for my county.’
‘It’s really important work,’ said Mary. ‘Your father’s dead against the CND.’
‘Of course,’ Martin said. ‘Are you fool enough to believe that if we gave up our nuclear weapons the Soviets would meekly scrap theirs? Fat chance.’
Mary started telling you about Claude Hillman, whom she characterized as ‘your mad Uncle Claude’.
‘I hear he’s saying he owns a racehorse.’
‘Probably. He does tend to exaggerate.’ She said that Claude was one of the CND marchers. He had been demonstrating peacefully outside the American Embassy in London, armed only with a couple of potatoes. The police were stuffing protesters into Black Marias.
‘So one of the police says to Claude, “You aren’t planning to throw that potato, I hope, Sir?” And Claude says no, he wasn’t.’
Martin took over the tale. ‘So as the Black Maria starts to move off, Claude shoves the potato into the exhaust pipe. Of course, the car stops; the Black Marias are immobilized.’
You gave a short laugh. ‘That was pretty neat.’
‘A crime against the state, nevertheless. They collared him and locked him up in the cells for the night.’
‘Pleased to hear it,’ you said, inadvertently making a move, undecided as to where you stood on that issue. But Martin knew.
‘Yes, I’ve landed a post under the Minister for Health. We’re going to transform this country, my boy!’
‘Someone suggested I could get my leg sorted out, possibly by the National Health Institute. Is that so?’
‘The National Health Service, you mean. Yes, now that Nye Bevan is the Minister, the plan’s going ahead. It’ll be up and running soon, never mind so many doctors are trying to stop us.’
‘You mean to say that all injuries and illnesses are going to be treated for free?’
‘That’s the plan, yes. Free teeth, free spectacles. The country will become healthy in no time. My job’s slightly different; I’m trying to relieve kiddie suffering. There are too many unfortunate children, most of them orphans after the war. Getting into trouble, causing mischief. Some of them probably demonstrating outside the American Embassy. My job is to arrange to ship them out to the colonies to new lives – lives full of promise and adventure.’
‘Colonies? I thought we’d done with colonies.’
‘You know what I mean. Australia, New Zealand, Canada.’ He went into some detail, quoting numbers of orphans and future shipping dates.
‘Do these children want to go to Canada?’ you asked.
‘They don’t know what they do want; they’re just kids. It’s up to us to decide for them. But this afternoon, never mind that, I’m going to knock up a few sixes.’
He adjusted his red cap at a jaunty angle, nodding at you to make the point sink home.
‘Good luck, Dad! Hope you score a century. I must pack, I’m going to live and work in London.’
Your father did not ask you what the work was. Instead, he said, ‘You can surely spare time to watch your old pop hit a few boundaries, can’t you?’
He was attempting pathos, this man who walked with a slight limp – just as you now did, from your wartime injury, he did from his injury in the earlier war.
‘Oh, do support us, darling,’ said your mother. ‘It’ll be a splendid afternoon. The WI are doing teas at four o’clock.’
‘Sorry, folks, I want to catch the 3.40 train.’
‘Why don’t you buy yourself a motor car?’ Mary asked.
‘Can’t afford it. Don’t need one anyhow, in London.’
You walked slowly upstairs to your room, regretful that once more you had let your father down. You had watched him play cricket when you were a lad, and knew him to be a good bat and no mean bowler. He wanted you to see him exercise his skill. You denied him that pleasure.
You thought your father a mite pathetic. It was a time of disillusion. The nations gaining from the war had been the Soviet Union, now dominating Eastern Europe, and the USA, untouched by destruction, now enjoying a flourishing culture. Britain, aware of its moral virtue as the one country that had stood against Hitler, had emerged from the war impoverished, shabby, weary.
Once in your room, you began to root about aimlessly, uncertain what to take away with you. The sun shone into a corner of the room, where a butterfly net stood. From the box room, you pulled out a trunk with PLA labels on it. From the bottom of a cupboard you dragged out your old school tuckbox, with S. W. FIELDING printed on it in large white letters. As you lifted it on to the bed, your mother entered the room.
Mary Fielding’s manner was unusually hesitant. She put a hand up delicately to pat her hair and adjust her bun.
‘I – we are so sorry you are leaving home, Stephen. I do hope you know what you’re doing.’
You took in her green dress, which reached well below her knees, realizing you had known it for a long while, as you had also known her slightly withdrawn expression, as if she were expecting a blow. The reference to your coming departure was a reminder that there had for long been a stiffness between you. It was a cause for sorrow, yet you could not be entirely clear which of you had first generated it; surely not the small child you had been, dependent upon your mother’s good will. Valerie, that prevailing ghost, was to blame.
‘Got to go, mother. The furnitu
re business calls!’ You attempted a note of facetiousness.
‘I’m sad about it. I heard just this morning that a friend of mine, Wilhelmina, was killed when the Luftwaffe bombed Exeter. It was a while ago but I’ve only just heard. Her sister wrote to me. That horrid war! And now I find you are going to leave us –’
‘It’s a case of the fledgling leaving the nest, mother, I’m afraid.’
‘We thought you intended to become a geologist.’
‘Lots of houses going up, mother, all in dire need of furniture. Crying out for it, from Peterborough to Peterhead.’
The forced jocularity quelled her. But she moved forward. Absent-mindedly, she picked at the painted lid of the tuckbox, nerving herself to say, ‘Stephen dear, there’s always this distance between us. I wish I understood why.’
This was your chance to speak out, to ask her why you as a child had been left exposed to danger on Walcot beach, day after day. Perhaps there was a simple explanation: perhaps she had been unaware of the tidal threat; perhaps she had been too lazy, or too unwell to accompany you, letting you go alone because she understood there was something in your personality which required solitude even at that young age.
So you missed an opportunity. Why was that?
Cowardice? Compassion? How can you stand in front of your mother and accuse her of murder, or attempted murder?
How could you require solitude at the age of four? Surely not?
Oh, there were such distances … I don’t know the answer. Do you?
I am gaining understanding. That’s the object of the exercise.
You could not ask the question, for whatever reason. Possibly you sensed you would simply be faced by her denial, her stonewalling.
Instead, you asked her what had become of Valerie.
‘Who is Valerie? I don’t know the name.’
So there was a denial of knowledge.
You confronted her, not as a son but as a stern stranger, reminding her that your boyhood had been burdened by a phantom daughter by the name of Valerie, embodying a perfection neither you nor Sonia could rival.
‘Oh, oh, that child! Was her name Valerie? I had forgotten.’ She brushed back an imaginary hair from her face. Certainly her facial expression, her whole body language, was as uncomfortable as if she did remember. The sun had moved round, so that it now stained only a narrow strip of wallpaper by the window.
You said that you understood her motherly anguish in losing an earlier child. You pressed her to admit that it had been a daughter. She put a finger horizontally to her lips as if to hush herself. She said that the dead baby had been taken away from her quickly and she had never been informed if it was a boy or a girl.
‘It was a girl, wasn’t it, mother? A girl you had planned to call Valerie –’
Suddenly her right hand covered her face as she said indistinctly that, yes, it was a little girl, a little girl who had been delivered stillborn.
‘My little little girl – Oh, my God –’
She was weeping. You did not tell her what Sonia had told you – that your mother had attended a psychotherapist, the sessions continuing for some years. You put an arm around her shoulders but made no other attempt by sign or word to comfort her as she had her brief cry out.
What would you say about this disproportionate mourning over a long-dead baby, at a time when Britain – and not Britain alone – was trying to come to terms with the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the deaths of millions?
Why do you bring that up? You were responsible for all that cruelty! Sometimes I am overcome by a terrible disgust of you and your existence.
No, you are not. Those are mere words from your locker. I shall continue.
‘I must go to your father,’ Mary said, quaveringly, mopping her eyes with a tiny square of handkerchief. ‘I’ve made some sandwiches. You’re always so resentful of me, Stephen. I don’t know why. I don’t deserve it. Don’t deserve it at all. After all I’ve suffered.’
She left the room. You stood there by the bed, scowling with thought, unhappy, disturbed. It seemed that you stood apart from yourself, scrutinizing your own motives. Your reason for not feeling warmth for your mother was perhaps an excuse for your own cold nature, did you but know it. Perhaps she really was a kind woman and loving mother; perhaps it was simple trust in her son that had permitted her to let you play happily on the Walcot beach all day.
For you had been happy there. Perhaps it was Aunt Violet who had poisoned your mind against your mother, poisoned it with suspicion. Your dear Aunt whom you had loved and with whom you had eventually made love, had she nursed a jealous hatred of Mary?
The fact was that you did not understand either woman well enough to free yourself from suspicion, or from shunning both your parents.
You stood there in your room, looking out of the window, staring blankly at the semi-urban landscape: the garden, the hedge, the by-road running past and, beyond the road, tall elms in early leaf, with a line of semi-detached houses beyond.
You turned slowly and began to throw out the contents of your school tuckbox: an old pullover, an old pair of swimming trunks, a wooden monkey that could climb a stick, a paperback edition of Darkness at Noon, some once-loved magazines, including copies of Modern Boy containing the adventures of Castern of the South Seas. ‘He go big sky blong Jesus.’
You were almost at the bottom of the box.
You pulled out some school exercise books, smiled at them, deciding they might as well go. Below them lay a spade. Sighing, you lifted it from its resting place. It was a child’s wooden seaside spade, dark in colour, the grain standing out from use, making it look almost like fur. You ran your fingers down from the loop of handle to the blade. As you did so, that primitive sense of touch carried you back in time. Again you heard the ripple of tiny transparent waves on sand, the splash of your own footsteps in warm shallow pools. Again you felt – if only for a moment – the intensity of living free in the sun, totally alone on Walcot beach. Before you had learnt about loneliness.
But there were other things at the bottom of that tuckbox.
I have forgotten.
Nothing is forgotten here. There were fifty-two pencils lying there, unused.
Oh yes. I left them in there when I went to London.
What was remarkable about those pencils?
It was when I was in my adolescence – when I was what later was called a teenager. I went through a period of depression. I developed kleptomania. It lasted only for a few months but I could not stop myself. It was just pencils I nicked. As you can see, they’re all unused.
You knew what you were doing.
I felt ghastly. I couldn’t stop myself. I haunted stationers’ shops. I was terrified of being arrested: my parents would have thrown me out of the house. And I felt guilty. But I just couldn’t stop myself. I was humiliated to think I was a common thief.
What else do you notice about these pencils?
I never had any use for them. I kept them to remind me of that bad period. Oh, they all have little round rubbers at the top, all fifty-two of them; for rubbing out.
Exactly.
Then you were alone in your room again. The enveloping voice had faded. You were putting the spade aside, preparing to leave home, your usual self again, self-contained.
8
Old Children
The art class at Shirley Warren Grammar was in full swing. Heads were bent over paper, water and watercolours splashed everywhere, broken wax crayons lay on the floor, uncrushed or crushed, spilling little patches of colour on the dull boards.
The arts mistress walked among the desks, prompting or encouraging here and there. She paused by the bent shoulders of Joyce Wilberforce to watch as Joyce worked almost in a fury, now whirling a red crayon, now a black. She asked the child what she was drawing.
Joyce replied with one word, without looking up: ‘God.’
She seized a yellow crayon and began making strong verticals.
Not witho
ut a hint of reproach, the mistress ventured that no one knew what God looked like.
‘They will do now,’ said Joyce. She still concentrated on her work of creation, without looking up. She was eight-and-a-half years old.
Why tell me all this?
It is a part of your lifetime.
There’s a deeper reason?
Yes.
Both Joyce and her brother Douglas had been forced to leave their boarding schools and attend the local day school instead: expense had thus been saved. Douglas now walked home with his sister when classes were over. They were on reasonably good terms.
This afternoon, Douglas stopped to play football with some friends on a stretch of waste ground. A goal had been drawn in chalk on the wall of a ruined house. Recently, a much smaller goal had been drawn within the larger outline, to make goal-scoring more difficult. Six boys were running about, yelling, kicking the improvised ball. Joyce and a friend, another girl, looked on affecting carefully posed attitudes of nonchalance.
‘Goal!’ The yell went up. Dougie pranced briefly, shaking his fists above his head, enjoying his prowess. He ran off to join his sister. They made their way uphill through a side alley.
‘We’re a lost tribe,’ said Joyce, assuming a croak. ‘Far from home, in a jungle. We’ve run out of water.’
‘Right. And the cannibals are after us.’ They hastened their steps. ‘We’ve had nothing to eat for days. We’ll probably die. I think my leg’s going to fall off.’
A mongrel dog trotted by. ‘I just saw a wolf,’ she said. ‘The jungle’s thick with them.’
Dougie tore a branch from a self-planted elder tree. Using it as a stick, bending his back, limping slightly, he said, ‘We’re old children. We got old during the Crime-Here War. There was rationing but they left us out.’