Brian Aldiss - Walcot

‘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.