Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

Men aged twenty were already being conscripted into the forces; Britain was painfully waking. An old boy, a colonel, came down and talked to the school angrily about war. A recruiting poster appeared on the notice board. Hitler and Mussolini made their Pact of Steel. We swam in the green swimming-pool, and wanked and exercised and waited for the invisible flags that signal to young men.

As Hitler’s Panzer divisions swept into Poland, my stern old grandfather was felled by a stroke. Nelson, my father, and I were sitting about uselessly in Grandfather’s silent house when Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was now at war with Germany. A few moments later our old family doctor pronounced Grandfather dead.

‘Just as well the old man never lived to hear the worst,’ Father said. He thought that war would ‘ruin everything’; and that was his dead father’s view also. Nelson and I looked speculatively at each other. I was two days past my seventeenth birthday. He, three years older, wore an incongruous army uniform. He had been called up two months before; this was his first forty-eight-hour leave. He and I had never seemed further apart; but he evidently understood what I was thinking, for he said, ‘You can’t join up yet!’

‘You’ll have to go back to school, Horatio,’ Father said. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe at Branwells. The Germans will not be able to bomb us here.’

But I never went back to school again. Partly this was due to my parents; both were obsessed with how we could all be ‘safe’; Father began building an enormous air-raid shelter in the garden, conscripting me to help with the digging and concrete-mixing. It seemed to me an extremely futile operation.

My chief reason for wishing never to see Branwells again, however, was entirely because of Virginia.

We met a few days after war was declared, when the country was quivering with an indecisive excitement. That excitement also ran through Virginia’s slender frame. She had handed in her notice at Branwells and was going to join a nursing service! She hoped to go to France – she had old family friends in Paris.

This was – I must use the melodramatic old cliché which rang through my head at the time – the knell of doom. We were to be parted, perhaps for ever! I had hardly ever looked ahead. Inside our relationship I had been safe. The most I had imagined was that we should be together in the long summer holidays, that we might even swim in the river; or perhaps she and I might arrange to go down to the Hunstanton bungalow; or we would make love in one of the towers of Traven House. But now we were going to part for ever, and her darling tiny light would shine elsewhere! Paris! She might as well have said Mars!

Faced with the prospect of parting, I realized bitterly I was just a kid. How could I keep her? Or find her again once she had gone?

One thing at least was certain: those grey school buildings would be utterly intolerable without her dear transforming presence.

I broke down and wept, but later and alone, when the shock really hit me. When Virginia was beside me I met her news with schoolboy flippancy.

‘Oh, you’ll look so ducky in nursing uniform, Virginia, and all the men will go mad about you! I must see you in it at least once.’

‘I don’t want to drive you mad!’

‘I am mad already. Before you go – Mother keeps asking me to ask you – come and have tea with us! Mother is anxious to see you again. And you’ll see Ann – she’s getting quite grown-up. She bought a lipstick in Woolworth’s the other day, and puts it on when Mother is out.’

She sighed and looked down at her shoes.

‘Do you want me to come to tea?’

‘Not much. I mean, I shall be glad of the chance to see you, any old chance. But Mother can be a bit oppressive.’

‘She doesn’t think there’s anything … funny going on between us?’

I frowned at her. ‘Funny? What’s funny between us, Sister Traven? I’m dead serious, I don’t know about you!’

In the end she agreed to come to tea that Friday. I have already given some account of that farewell feast.

When it was over, and I had driven with her to the cemetery, and she had gone, and I had dragged slowly back home to make another entry in my secret ‘Virginia Journal’, I lay for a long while on my bed, thinking about my life. Seldom had I so rigorously searched my soul; introspection was rare for me.

In those days I was incapable of seeing myself as essentially the ordinary fellow I now reluctantly conclude myself to be; I alternated between holding myself a great saint or a great sinner. One thing I did see: that, by what I then reckoned my own fault, I had failed to awake any real loving response in my parents. My brother and sister loved me, and I was lucky in them; but theirs was the slaphappy relationship of fellow nestlings in the brood. I had become a rather isolated and independent character. Sex, I told myself, had taken the place of affection.

However, there was Virginia. Out of the sordid chaos of school and my life in general, she had provoked, inspired, the best love of which I was capable. I wanted more of her love (even if she didn’t love me very greatly); and I wanted to give her more. What had I ever given her, I, a spotty youth?

A great emptiness filled me to think how unworthy I was.

With the emptiness, a stabbing knowledge; she’s left school now – the world’s big – you will lose sight of her any day – she’s not so closely tied to you, why should she be? – she could disappear without another word.

True! Within me, waiting for this opportunity to reveal itself, lay more intuitive understanding of this strange woman I loved. She was elusive to me; and so she was to herself. Infinitely precious, she could so easily be infinitely lost.

I almost broke out of my room in search of her at that instant. Standing caged, I rested my forehead against my locked bedroom door.

I resolved to go and see her again next day. I had to make some definite arrangement with her. That was what we had never had. Never had I shown her how deeply I cared; maybe I had been afraid to.

We had to have a proper relationship. After all, I was no longer a child. Neither of us was going back to Branwells. No longer need our love be clandestine. At last I saw the advantages of growing up!

That night brought me no sleep. I tried to read, could not; slipped down the drainpipe outside my window, walked to the outskirts of the town, came back, still could not rest. Eventually, tired and disgusted with myself, I took the usual way into oblivion and tossed myself off. Then I slept.

Next morning, her lovely face, half-mocking, was before me. While Mother told Father across the breakfast table everything Virginia had said at tea the previous day, I resolved that I must speak to Virginia – speak to her seriously.

Clear on what I had to do, I was muddled on how to do it.

Virginia’s arrangements were slightly complicated. She had never wanted me to write to her at Traven House because one of the servants there pried into her affairs; I always wrote to an address in Nottingham, where she said she had some rooms. It was to this address that I resolved to go – it was accessible by train, whereas Traven House stood miles off the map, and was too intimidating besides. I slipped away from home after lunch, pretending I was off for a game of cricket.

Such idiot plans court disaster. It was, really, my first set-back in the Virginia affair, and indirectly it may have helped me to stand apart from her.

The train chugged into Nottingham Midland Station by 2.30 and I set out on foot for Union Street. The name on paper always sounded so romantic: the union referred to was ours, hers and mine. The reality lay near the lunatic asylum and was extremely drab, a succession of terraced houses punctuated by shops in a semi-industrial area. My step faltered in dismay.