Brian Aldiss - Walcot

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.

And Mary would sniff and say that these were awful times they were living in.

‘It’s the end of the British Empire,’ Martin would respond. ‘India has let us down. Remember when the present king held his durbar in Delhi? What a show that was. Those times are gone for ever.’

‘Good old King George and Queen Mary,’ your mother exclaimed.

‘I’ve nothing against him, but what’s he ever done for the poor? Look at the miners.’

And Mary would say, rather despairingly, ‘Martin, couldn’t we just talk about happy things?’

‘Like what?’ your father would ask.

She would gesture. ‘Oh, can’t we ever laugh? I long for humour the way you long for a pork chop.’

‘You’re too superficial, that’s the trouble with you, dear.’

Your little sister, detecting something frosty in the air, perhaps another cold row brewing, would bang heartily on a tin tray with a spoon, while shrieking at the top of her voice her favourite swear word, ‘Shuggerybees!’

You often wondered where Sonia got her high spirits from.

You were barely in your teens when you bought a book for twopence off a market stall. It was called The Old Red Sandstone. You were attracted by the title –

I don’t remember it .

Yes, you do. Your father approved, because the book was written by a working man who became a geologist, a rare achievement in early Victorian times. What fascinated you were such dramatic passages as, ‘At this period in our history some terrible catastrophe involved the sudden destruction of the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps far more. It exhibits unequivocally the marks of violent death …’

Yes, I was thrilled by it, and by the idea of geology. Better than any fairy tale!

It was to play a part in your later life .

I don’t think so .

We shall see, shan’t we?

Before you were sent away to school – possibly the very reason why you were sent away to school – your remarkable sister Sonia had arrived in the world. Although she could never compare with Valerie, the perfect daughter, she immediately occupied your parents’ attention. Your mother doted on her, absorbing all her, somewhat fickle, attention.

Your father, meanwhile, disliked displays of emotion. Perhaps his war injury reinforced his withdrawn character. Ignoring socialist principles, he sent you away to a nearby public school as soon as possible.

One consolation in this form of exile was the weekly arrival of your favourite magazine, Modern Boy . In the pages of Modern Boy you followed the adventures of ‘Captain Castern of the South Seas’. Captain Mike Castern sailed a ketch about the Pacific Ocean. He had a crew of Kanakas, who would say of a dead man – and someone, generally wicked, died every week – things such as, ‘Dat man he go big sky blong Jesus.’

At school, you developed an eccentric habit. There were certain senior boys whose looks were so peculiar in your eyes that you christened them with sentences from books you had been reading. That fellow with the swollen red face, suffering from some variant of acne rosacea, you dubbed, ‘Morning dawned, red and angry’. Another fellow was ‘The burly janitor replied’. Another was a thin fellow with a downcast air; he was christened, ‘He watched it drain away without regret’. Another lumbering fellow was ‘One excellence I crave’; but he left school early.

A curious protocol about these phrases dictated that you had to utter them obsessively to yourself whenever you caught sight of the boy to whom they referred. Often – for instance when the whole school was filing into the school chapel – the phrases had to be mumbled quickly, one after the other. The habit served to distance yourself from the other boys. You had contracted a splinter of isolation from your father.

You gave other boys of your own age, with whom you were more closely associated, exotic secret names, known only to yourself. You may recall Pyrodee Nangees, Trevor Birdshit, Fizure, Georgie Suckletrot and Gaspar de Peckubee. And a dull-looking day boy who became simply Fartadoo.

This inventive turn of mind caused you also to form with a friend a secret clique of two, called ‘The Royal Society for the Overthrow of All Masters and the Government’. You and your friend were required to chant fifty times, ‘We the Murderers will Overthrow all stinking rotten Masters – pooh! – and the stinking rotten Gov’ment, too.’ The society flourished only for one term, to die of boredom since you were unable to dream up the means by which to execute your good intentions: although teams of well-trained cobras certainly entered into one of your proposals.

Following the example set by Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone , you took to reading the strange books with strange titles you found in the library: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, On the Use of the Herb Slac, The Return of the Native (the native what, you wondered), and The End of the Imp , translated from the Russian.

Among the strange books you were reading, cheek-by-jowl with Captain Castern, was one entitled The Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Thomas Browne . This volume contained many curiosities, including a paper on certain fossil remains discovered at Winterton. Winterton was the first place at which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked. It lies on the North Norfolk coast, not very far from Walcot.

Browne, a seventeenth-century doctor, said: ‘Upon the same coaste, butt at some miles distance, divers great bones are sayd to have been found, & I have seen one side of a lower jaw containing very large teath petrified, farre exceeding the teeth of the biggest ox. It was found after a great flood neere to the cliff, some thousand loades of earth being broaken down by the rage of the sea.’