Brian Aldiss - The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

‘Yes, Father.’

‘There’s a good lad! Let’s see if she’s got something nice for my tea.’

I thought at the time how damned nice he was, and how uncouth and depraved I must have seemed, trying to get him to go for a drink; as far as I knew, he had never seen the inside of a pub. And as a bank manager he had a position to keep up. What made Father seem all the more mild and restrained was that he should make only oblique reference to a squabble of the previous month, when Nelson had actually taken me into a country-type pub just on the outskirts of town; we had each smoked a fag and drunk a half-pint of shandy – and on emerging into the guilty light of day had been spotted by one of the bank’s prosperous customers and reported. Father was extremely angry on that occasion (the customer had been Mr. Tansley-Smith), and Nelson and I had had a lecture about the evils of drink and the sort of company we were likely to meet in such disgraceful haunts as ‘The Three Feathers’.

So that was it. When it came time for me to get my London train, Father said no more about ‘The Three Feathers’ episode, or about my strange invitation to him, and we parted with a good affectionate handshake; but I could only feel he expected that no good would come of me in London and would hold out no great hopes for my future.

Mother, at the last moment, appeared more perky.

‘It’s a shame you should be leaving me so soon, darling! You’re so young!’

‘I’ve been going away to school for years, though, haven’t I?’

‘That’s different! Still, I suppose you will be able to look after yourself – if you find a good landlady. Why, she’ll probably love to have a boy of your age to mother! She’ll spoil you! And perhaps she’ll ask your poor old mother down to stay, one day! And you will write every week, won’t you? Nice long letters?’

It all seemed like an anticlimax. At one time I had imagined that Nelson, Ann and I would stage a sort of absolutely bloody little revolution of our own and march out of the house en masse. But we left one by one, going forth from the paternal roof as much in bewilderment as revolt, reluctantly rather than grandly.

London was also not as I had imagined it; my arrival was hardly triumphal. But I soon found lodgings in a gaunt little house standing at the extreme north end of Queensway, where I rented a gaunt little room under the roof. The tenants were a Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson – Wilf and Lou, as they soon became. I rarely saw Wilf; he had a night job, maintenance man on the Underground, but his wife was kind to me and fed me well, although she was in other respects a rather mean woman. I did not greatly mind. I had other interests.

First among these must be counted the thrill of being in London. That great city was then at one of its historical turning points. As I look back to that autumn and winter of 1939 now, I see a city of long ago, ruled by men who were essentially Victorian, inhabited in its less fashionable thoroughfares by people who held many of the beliefs of the Victorian Age, and who lived among the relics of that age. It was a city which, despite the First World War, had peace built into it and so was able to turn only reluctantly and face the angry dawns of war.

But that very effort had stirred it up. You knew that something was happening in London, a sort of phychic earthquake. Out of the massed villages that together constitute the capital, people were slipping; and, as unobtrusively, new people were slipping in, like rowboats passing unnoticed under Tower Bridge, bringing dynamite. Signs of war were apparent. Barrage balloons hung here and there. Adhesive paper criss-crossed on windows. Sandbags were up. The city was getting secret. It was after dark that the subversive aspects became most apparent. In the blackout, London hummed like the larger version of the dormitories of Branwells that it was. I was too young to realize that yet, for I had still to find my way around; but I certainly picked up the tension on my highly tuned antennae.

I had no trouble in getting a job in one of the ministerial departments now rapidly springing up everywhere. I chose it not only because it was just round the cornet from Lou Stevenson’s, but because it was housed in a gigantic building and had a STAFF VACANCIES notice on the door as well as an attractive air of mystery in its seedy porch.

My duties were both light and nebulous, consisting almost entirely of sorting an endless stack of file cards into two packs: those bearing the names of males and those bearing the names of females; and then shuffling the female pack into alphabetical order. Half the women in the British Isles must have slipped through my fingers.

One morning, as I was leaving Lou’s for the department, a letter arrived for me bearing Virginia’s ‘aristocratic scrawl’ on the envelope. I opened it and read it – a glance sufficed to do that – as I emerged among the pedestrians in the grey and sooty Bishop’s Bridge Road.

The thought of Virginia had never been far from me. On my first day in London, as soon as I had found a room and taken my few possessions from my papier-maché suitcase, I sat on the bed and wrote to her, giving her my address, announcing dramatically my arrival in the metropolis. I could not resist telling her that I had come especially to find her; although I declared that I loved her, I was careful to add that I would not make myself a nuisance to her; I longed only to see her as soon as possible.

It was eleven long days later that her answer arrived, to be ripped open in the Bishop’s Bridge Road. With what I told myself was facile despair, I had begun to assure myself that she would never reply: she had done just as I feared and vanished into the great hazy quicksands of the world.

Virginia’s tone in her note lay somewhere between guarded and chilly. She simply invited me to come and see her at 8.10 on the following night. Her letter offered at least an implied explanation for her delay in answering; her address was now in Lansdowne Lane.

At seventeen, all love’s weather is heavy. As I sorted my filing cards, I thought I would say to her bravely, before she could speak, ‘I know you have ceased to care about me; I am too proud to bother you further’; and I would turn and lose my way for ever in the dark streets of the capital. Or at another moment, I thought – well, it is immaterial now what I thought, all those years ago. All day I worked away at my trestle table, wondering at how a letter like mine could be answered by a letter like hers; for I had yet to grasp the simple principle that adults finally and sadly have to grasp, that people follow their own behaviour which they are not necessarily able to alter for anyone else. Only the immature can throw up everything and begin anew.

I had to question several people in the department before I discovered how to find her address. ‘It’s somewhere off Holland Park Avenue,’ I was told.

Those were hungry days; I was always short of cash. On the next evening I left work, went back to my room to wash and spruce myself up, watering down my hair and all that, and then returned to the streets, passing the department again to get to a little pie-and-peas shop I had found. The pies were cheap and good. With luck, with will-power, I could make that meal my tea and supper; on a bad day, and they came fairly frequently, I would be I forced by the thought of closing time to burst out of my room again later in the evening, to seek another bite to eat.

Full of pie, I headed towards Notting Hill and Virginia. Now I worried chiefly over the precision of Virginia’s timing, as implied in her letter. She wished me to appear at 8.10. Exactly what was the nicety of her arrangements that eight should be too early for her and 8.15 presumably too late?