Brian Aldiss - Walcot

‘Sarah and Ernie produced five children: first of all three boys, and then two girls, of which your dear Mother was the last to be born.’

Martin cast Mary an affectionate, if patronizing, glance as he mentioned her. The cold row was over.

‘You can imagine that Ernie’s increasing prosperity was shared by many of the lower classes at that time. Only four of your generations ago, Steve, listen to this, most people in England lived the sort of life Zachariah Frost lived; ill-educated, hand-to-mouth, having too many kids, dying young. Change since then has been incalculable, mainly thanks to the rise of Socialism.’

Socialism always backed science.

‘These three Frost, or Wilberforce, sons formed an architectural partnership. Things were looking up. The town itself was expanding. The partnership built many of the rows of houses in which a new generation of engineers and artisans and other workers lived. It’s all in the records. The sons all married young. They needed wives for social purposes. You’ll remember your Uncle Jeremy and Auntie Flo’s little house, with its cheerful geranium window boxes?’

You did remember it. Uncle Jeremy’s house was full of heavy furniture. The rooms smelt of mothballs. Sombre engravings of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and similar improving subjects hung on the walls in heavy frames. Jeremy and Flo employed a little servant girl called Ann.

When you were taken visiting to the house, you used to run off to see Ann. She lived in the gloomy rear of the house until called. Ann was nice to you. Ann would even do a cute little dance for you. Ann was of obscure origin, probably illegitimate. She was quick and ardent, always smiling. What secret sorrows were hers you never knew. Nor did her employers enquire. Many feelings natural to earlier generations were necessarily repressed in the name of progress. When Ann finally climbed, late at night, to her tiny cabin in the attic, no one knew or thought to know what eternities of hope or disappointment she underwent there.

‘Then the war came,’ Martin went on, although this was on another occasion, just after your pet rabbit died. ‘1914. I’ll never forget the date. August 1914. It was royalty brought the war about. The blinking Crowned Heads of Europe! The war gradually ground into action, swallowing up young men all over Europe and far beyond. Among those cast into the maw of this monster were the three brothers of the architectural partnership; your uncles, poor buggers.’

‘Martin!’ exclaimed Mary, reprovingly.

‘I said beggars. Off they bravely went – Bertie, Jeremy and Ernest, Sarah shedding motherly tears as she waved them off on the train.’

‘My poor mother! What she went through!’

‘Two of the lads were captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in an Oflag. The third one, Ernie – a handsome youth of twenty-one – stopped a bullet at Passchendaele and died on the spot.’

‘It was the Somme, of all places,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to know. He got shot in the Somme offensive. August 1916.’

‘The Somme,’ cried Sonia, bored with talk of war. ‘That was where I got my hunchback.’ She was sitting huddled in an armchair with Gyp, our Airedale, sprawling on her lap. Suddenly she threw Gyp off. ‘I’m going to have an operation to get it removed.’

‘Do stop that nonsense,’ your mother scolded her. ‘Valerie would never say anything like that.’

The dog sat and scratched himself, staring at Sonia with a look of amazement. Everyone was amazed by Sonia.

Martin pressed grimly on with his account.

‘They say Ernie fell face down in the mud, was trampled over, got buried in it – never to play his banjo in the Strand again. Sarah, his widow, never remarried, poor lass.’

‘She set up a teashop with a lady companion. It stood on what’s now the Southampton Road,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie and I often used to go there in the old days.’

‘The other two brothers, Bert and Jeremy, returned unharmed at the end of the war. Jeremy rejoined his Flo – her folks were no one much – and Bertie married Violet from Grantham, a member of the smart Parkins family. The Parkinses manufactured the latest thing in lawnmowers for the upwardly mobile generations. Violet is a bit of a goer – I’d say out of Bertie’s class.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t trust Violet further than I could throw her!’

Contemplating the idea of anyone throwing any aunties anywhere, Sonia burst into laughter. Her mother hushed her.

‘Any road, at Violet’s prompting, Bertie ceased to pursue his architectural career. He became instead a stunt pilot. Violet thought that was much more glamorous. He flew with Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Display, touring the country and delighting audiences with his daring. Jeremy remained with the architectural business, sole owner. Bedazzled by his young wife, skittish Flo, he began to neglect his work. Gradually the business went downhill. Bertie finally gave up his flying and joined the sinking business. He and Jeremy built that little Baptist chapel down Greenacres Road.’

You imagined that old Zachariah Frost was a refugee from some starving stretch of the country, where life for the poor was even harder than life in the towns. Sonia drew a picture of him in crayon: a terrible old man with a big, hook nose and a hump on his back. Martin snatched up the paper and was furious at what he saw.

‘You should show some respect, girl!’

Sonia jumped up, stamping her foot. She grabbed the paper back.

‘It’s me! It’s not him! It’s me, dressed up. Mind your own business.’

You would never have dared speak to your father like that. It would have provoked a beating.

‘We’ve never had hunchbacks in our family,’ Martin said. He enjoyed telling you and your sister about the family history. You listened more passively than Sonia. But you, like her, were obsessed with your appearance. Shutting yourself in your north-facing bedroom, you would stare at your face in the looking glass. Eyes of an indeterminate colour. But were you not rather aristocratic , by and large? Possibly lantern-jawed? What was a lantern jaw? Did it shine like a lantern? Lantern-jawed. You spent hours practising being lantern-jawed, walking round the room being lantern-jawed.

And still your father did his best to educate you in family history.

‘We Fieldings became more prosperous earlier than did the Frosts,’ Martin said. ‘In the parish records, William Fielding comes into the picture with dates attached. Born in the eighteen-forties. His wife Isabelle – Isabelle Doughty, she was – was from the superior Norfolk family of Doughtys. Isabelle bore William seven children, no less. William himself was one of nine children, two of whom were daughters. Two of William’s brothers died at sea.’

‘We still have a record somewhere of the death of one of the brothers, James. James Fielding was Chief Petty Officer of the ship Montgomery . He died of a fever off the Grand Banks, aged twenty-five. A fine young man. His body was committed to the deep.’

Your father spoke these last words in a deep voice, as if to convey the depth of the ocean involved.

‘What are the Grand Banks actually, Daddy?’ you asked.

‘Not the same as Barclay’s Bank.’ Perhaps he thought he had made a joke. ‘No, the Grand Banks are off Newfoundland, and covered permanently in fog.’

‘Did they push him over the side when he was dead?’ Sonia asked. It was the first time she had shown any real interest in the account.

‘His coffin was lowered over the side with all due reverence.’ Martin gave his Aertex shirt a tug, as if to demonstrate.

‘It may have been these deaths that persuaded William to settle in Swaffham and open a chemist’s shop instead of going to sea. One of his sons, my dad, your grandfather, Sydney Fielding, established a similar business in Horncastle. He combined a dentistry with his pharmacy. In Horncastle were born all of Sydney and Elizabeth’s children, one of them being none other than me, your father.’