Brian Aldiss - Walcot

The formality of this message enclosed within the pages of a Bible convinced you of the solemnity of a Victorian courtship. Possibly it also spoke of something slightly stiff in the character of your grandfather.

The evidence of your father’s courtship of your mother was hardly more substantial, obscured as it was by the advent of war. Even before the Victorian Age was over, the nations of Europe were arming themselves against one other. In another August, an August graver than the one we have been discussing, war broke out after a shot was fired in Sarajevo. One by one, the nations were drawn towards the flame. Soon, all of Europe was at war. And your father was of an age to volunteer to fight. So the story went that young Martin Fielding became a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, which at a later date became the Royal Air Force. He flew in Sopwith Camels, first of all on the Western Front and then in Mesopotamia. He shot down three German planes and became an air ace, with his picture in the Daily Graphic .

When Martin’s plane crashed he was injured and spent some months in a hospital in Cairo – ‘Cairo of all places’, as your mother was frequently to say thereafter. In 1918, with the war ending, he was brought home on a troopship. The troopship moored a mile outside Southampton harbour, the troops fretting over the delay about getting ashore. It is here that Martin emerges from being ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ and becomes part of the folklore of your family. Martin dived off the troopship and swam ashore, in his impatience to meet again Miss Mary Wilberforce, to whom he was engaged. Another reason for his rebellious act was that he had become politicized by his wartime experiences. He had experienced the great division between men and officers and became a Socialist.

Mary Wilberforce lived in a sleepy cathedral town outside London. It was her younger brother, Bertie, who was later to marry your Aunt Violet; her older brother, Ernest, was killed in the Battle of the Somme. You can understand that all over Europe, people were scuttling everywhere, trying to pick up the threads of their lives, hoping to restore a normality that had vanished and would never return to the world.

Mary Wilberforce married Martin Fielding in May of 1919. Many marriages must have taken place in that year, as people strove to put the horrors of the war behind them and reconstruct their lives. You may ask why, if Martin was in such a hurry to get ashore and claim his ladylove, the marriage was delayed for almost a year. Certainly Martin, your father, had been injured in the war, but the wound had healed sufficiently to enable him to swim that mile from ship to shore. It seems not unlikely that he was suffering from some other type of malady, possibly picked up during his weeks of recuperation in the city of Cairo.

Although your father had to give up flying, he did not lose his love of aviation. In 1924, the year you were born, Imperial Airways undertook a commercial programme of flights across the world. Martin worked for Imperial before moving to Vickers Aviation, where Bertie Wilberforce was also employed. Bertie was a pilot. Bertie flew a Vickers ‘Victoria’, a troop-carrying plane, to Kabul in Afghanistan in 1929, rescuing six hundred people threatened by revolution there.

Martin was active in trade unionism, determined to obtain better pay and conditions for the workers. He made himself unpopular and moved to another company on the South Coast. The family went with him.

Omega was to be sold.

‘We have to make sacrifices now and again,’ said Martin, consolingly, to his weepy wife.

The last summer spent at Walcot was during the nineteen-thirties, when war clouds were gathering and the voice of the dictator of Germany was growing louder and shriller. You had a small, lively sister, Sonia, by that time. Your mother accompanied Sonia and you down to the beach. Your father was also there, during one of his increasingly rare visits. Politics taking up more of his time, he was a candidate to become Socialist Member of Parliament for the New Forest constituency on the south coast, following the death of Bernie Hale, the previous incumbent.

While Sonia and you played on the newly revealed stretch of beach, your parents sat nearby on deck chairs. Both were fully dressed; your father, you remember, wore highly polished brown shoes. They always kept anxious eyes on Sonia who, in consequence, was nervous, and did not like to splash in the deeper pools. You were absorbed some distance away, chasing a small crab with your shrimping net. The intense murmuring silences of the sea were broken by Sonia’s shrieks and your father’s shouts at you. You caught the crab in your net before turning.

Sonia was lying on her back a few feet away, her hair in a shallow pool. She was crying in terror. Your father was ordering you to go to her aid. You popped the crab in your rubber pail and then ran over to her. While helping her to her feet, you could not understand why she had not got up of her own accord.

Your father was furious with you. ‘Why didn’t you hurry? Sonia could have drowned!’

‘No, she couldn’t. Her face was not in the water.’

He clenched his fist. ‘She almost drowned.’

‘No, she didn’t, dad, really.’

‘Don’t you argue with me, boy!’

‘I’m just saying her face –’

‘She was helpless. You didn’t care one bit, you little wretch.’

‘I rescued her, didn’t I?’

‘Go back to the bungalow at once! Get off the beach! Go away!’

After tipping your crab back into the warm pool, you made your way up the beach.

‘Come back, Stevie!’ called Sonia. ‘I’m all right! Really I am!’

You did not turn your head. You made your way down Archibald Lane without a tear. You went into Omega and settled down to read a book. You never in your childhood saw the beaches of Walcot again.

Of course there were other Wilberforces, other Fieldings.

You recall various splurges with some of them, and with other friends of yours – indeed, splurges too with strangers. Splurges when you were half-boy, half-adult, ending up in Indian restaurants, swilling down glasses of Kingfisher lager, showing off, laughing ‘fit to bust’.

You remember going off to pee one time, almost falling down the steep steps to Avernus, into the reeking, hot basement, realizing you were drunk, staggering, running your dirty hand over the dirty walls to steady yourself. Alien territory, sopping towels lying exhausted on the floor, doors marked successively STAFF, PRIVATE, LADIES, KEEP OUT. A fellow rushing by, throwing out a look of contempt as you were already unzipping, ready for the outpouring. GENTS, it said. And you smelt the urine/disinfectant smell like soup spilt on an oilcloth table cover. You tossed away in disgust from between your lips the half-puffed fag. It fell on the red-tiled floor. You directed a first splash at it to put it out, laughing weakly, then directing all your energy to the hard squirt into the china bowl, in which sodden things lay. You used your penis like a hose, amused to direct it to splash right up the wall. It writhed in your fingers, glad as a puppy for its master’s touch.

You did not know then that a time would come when you would climb unsteadily down those same stairs, to that same urinal, this time going slowly, hobbling even, the frayed remnant of what you cherished proudly long ago already leaking into your trousers in anticipation and then, when you make it to the sordid bowl, unable to produce anything but an irregular drip. You would lean your arm against the wall and your head against your arm and you would spit into the yellow trail below. You would not be miserable exactly. You would just know that you had run out of spark and spunk and steam, and would be sort of semi-glad of it. But all this awaits you in the future.