Brian Aldiss - The Twinkling of an Eye

In some ways, it became more comfortable to be at school – though there was always the dread of leaving home, of feeling that I was being kicked out. I never shed tears – except when I said goodbye privately to Tiny, who was growing old.

Ours became an excellent form as we moved steadily up the school. We laughed a lot. I endeavoured to read every book in the moderately well-equipped library. This was when I started on Freud and Gibbon and Eddington and anything to do with astronomy or the workings of the human mind. My mind was already giving me trouble. The novelists we much admired were Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Eric Linklater and J. B. Priestley. Graham Greene came along a little later.

Buckland was and is a sporting school. We played Chivenor, the nearby RAF station, at rugger, as well as various other public schools such as Blundells, outside Tiverton. All that strenuous exercise prepared us not only for the Army, but for life, to endure its hard knocks.

At the beginning of the autumn term, lorries arrived to collect the senior part of the school and drive us out to new agricultural developments on Exmoor, where heath had been turned into farm land. Acres and acres of potatoes were being grown. We worked from early in the morning until late, digging up long rows, turning up nests of those smooth vegetable eggs, while the sun sloped low towards the Atlantic.

It was backbreaking work. Our reward was to be driven home to school for mass baths, all grubby naked bodies steaming together, followed by a meal in hall of sausage with piles of mashed potatoes, our potatoes.

We also held drives for the Forces. At one time, a group of us, wearing clean rugger togs, pushed the school barrow around Swimbridge, collecting waste paper. We knocked on people’s doors. Sometimes they invited us in and plied us with cups of tea. Generously they gave, throwing out valuable books, sets of Edwards’ Birds, first editions of Anthony Trollope’s novels. But, ‘Us’ll keep us bound volumes of Punch , because them’s real valuable’.

What was really worthwhile went out with the rubbish. The mediocre was saved.

As in an inverted morality play.

Suddenly, after a long silence, he began to talk … ‘A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.’

Carlos Castaneda

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

We held a ‘Wings for Victory’ fair on WBS rugger field, the Huxtable. It was a great event. Our vendettas against local farmers were set aside so that we could borrow their carts. I turned what had been shameful into satire against myself and became Adolf for a day.

Some years previously, one of the innumerable Framlingham bullies, a creature with the skin of a bullfrog and hyperthyroid eyes to match, grabbed me and declared that I resembled Adolf Hitler. Dragging me into his foul den, he pulled a lock of my hair down over my forehead and painted a moustache of black boot polish on my upper lip. I was then made to goose-step round a senior common room, giving the Sieg Heil for the delectation of all the other bullies – many of whom would doubtless have given their eyeteeth to dress up in Nazi uniforms, rape Slav women, and bugger each other while strangling Jews.

By Buckland’s ‘Wings for Victory’ day, I had sufficiently recovered from this degradation to put the act to good use. Suitably uniformed, I mounted one of the farm carts and addressed all and sundry in gibber-German, looking remarkably like Adolf. Or so my friends and admirers told me later.

Hitler still exerts an awful attraction. He has proved to be many things to many men. Hugh Trevor-Roper captured something of the truth when he described Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries.’

Well, that does sound fascinating …

It is terrible to think one should still hold Hitler in mind. And I once imitated him! Even the young and innocent are fascinated by wickedness. I suppose it helped prepare us at WBS to be soldiers.

To Crasher Fay I owe more than mere learning. For English classes, we had to produce an essay every Monday. I was excused. Crasher permitted me to present a story instead. A gratifying privilege as we trudged towards the School Certificate …

By this time, the writing of short stories had become a continuous occupation. Our form enjoyed, shared, quoted, laughed aloud at Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That , as well as their less famous books, such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish . I wrote ‘Invalids and Illnesses’. It was sanitary enough to take home, where my mother read it. I overheard her saying to someone, after reading out a funny bit about diphtheria, ‘You may not like it, but it is clever.’ Eavesdroppers seldom hear good about themselves; I felt she had summed me up.

Most of my stories were less sanitary. They were mainly planetary adventures, dirty SF, crime, or dirty crime. Screwing featured largely. I often wrote in the dormitory, under the bedclothes by torch-light. The stories always remained first draft. Penny-a-read was the nominal charge. Nobody paid, everyone read. It was gratifying. A superior fellow in the Sixth, a horn-rimmed Harrison, said, ‘Aldiss, these tales of yours are ridiculous and badly constructed.’

He was probably right. But I wrote compulsively, and risked beating and expulsion if they fell into the wrong hands.

I also wrote and illustrated a series of comic tales, ‘ The Jest-So Stories ’. At term’s end, Bowler and I put all the manuscripts in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and buried it in a rabbit burrow in the Plantation, from where we retrieved it the following term.

I became prolific. At one of my more acceptable sardonic stories, presented as a Monday offering, Fay took offence. After reading parts of it aloud, he stared hard at me and said, ‘I warn you, Aldiss, if you go on like this you’ll become another Evelyn Waugh.’ Never had I heard such praise.

Bowler was a great character. He, Saxby, and I were jokers-in-chief. Don Smith was a more sophisticated type. He brought a wind-up gramophone and played jazz records. We heard for the first time Tommy Dorsey and Orchestra playing ‘Getting Sentimental Over You’, and, ah!, Jimmie Lunceford and his band playing ‘Blues in the Night’, with the Johnny Mercer lyrics:

From Natchez to Mobile

From Memphis to Saint Joe,

Wherever the four winds blow …

And wherever those cities were, there I wanted to be. I saw the movie Blues in the Night , which features Jimmy Lunceford, eighteen times over the years, in England and abroad. Almost as many times as Citizen Kane . As an adult, I sang the song in duet with the philosopher A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayers.

End of term. Back to that dreary Bickington shop on the corner. And now great excitement. Following Pearl Harbor, the United States of America had entered the war. On our side. What was more, an American regiment was to be flown over to Fremington.

Fremington was next to Bickington; one village straggled into the other along the main road. Under Dot’s guiding hand, the Bickington Women’s Institute decided to give the Americans a slap-up reception. Music and dancing would be the order of the day. There would be food and soft drinks. No alcohol, since we had heard the American forces drank – unlike, of course, our boys. Everything was made ready.