Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss
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in connection with that august event, the Seventh Conference of the IAFA in Houston, Texas on 12-16 March 1986, which I was privileged to attend as Guest of Honour.
B.W.A.
There should have been a law against the preparatory school I went to. Later, there was a law, and places like St Paul’s Court no longer exist. In the thirties, there must have been many of them dotting the country, little plague spots of pretention and ignorance.
I was sent there at the age of eight.
‘Be brave,’ my mother said. It was easier to be brave the first term than succeeding terms, when one knew what one was in for.
At the best of times, St Paul’s managed twenty pupils, twelve of whom were boarders. It was the headmaster’s resolve to turn us into gentlemen: that much was clearly stated in the brochure. Of course we all turned into scoundrels. The parents were mainly tradesmen in a modest way of business who wanted their sons to grow up to despise them.
My father was irked to discover, after a year or two, that he was the only parent who was paying the full fees demanded in the brochure. I kept this revelation secret, knowing that the boys – whose sense could not be entirely beaten out of them – would despise him if they found out.
St Paul’s was a large brick building which stood out starkly against the flat Norfolk coastline. Beach and sea lay just outside the back gate. The house was surrounded with sharp shingle, as if it had been caught by a high tide. To one side lay a large games field. In one corner of this field, behind a line of old apple trees, boarders were allowed to keep little gardens. One thing at least I learned to love at St Paul’s: gardening. It was almost a necessity.
The food was abominable. Meat was delivered in a van by Roy’s of Wroxham. To us little exiles, the van was a messenger from a happier world, for Wroxham was where one went to get boats to sail on the Broads. But the headmaster ordered the cheapest cuts, and our opinion of Roy’s became low as a result.
Most of the cooking was done by the headmaster himself. His name was Mr Fangby. He was a smoothly porcine man with a thin nose and thinning hair swept and stuck back over a domelike head. I never really disliked him for much of the time, though it is hard to say why. His wife looked after their child and, when meals were over, Mr Fangby could be seen doing the washing-up and dolorously drying the dishes on an old baby’s napkin.
Breakfast was the worst meal. The rule at St Paul’s was that plates had to be cleared. It was that rule, rather than the cooking, which made it possible to claim that the food was edible. The porridge was an impossible paste. One other boy and I often remained after the others had gone, getting the paste down spoonful by spoonful, with occasional bolts to the lavatory to vomit.
I took some tiny sweets back with me the next term. By concealing one in my mouth before we filed into the dining room, I used its flavour to camouflage the taste of the porridge. This ruse worked well for some weeks. But our enemy, the bootboy, who helped Fangby with breakfast, detected the sweet; I was in trouble, and my tuck was confiscated.
We were always hungry. Fangby was a lazy man, and the worst news of all was when he felt too lazy to take lessons. Then he would enter the dining room at breakfast time, all smiles, and announce a day’s holiday for good work. The news spelt starvation and boredom.
Out in the field we had to go. We were not allowed back into the house all day. Sometimes it would be eight o’clock or even later before either Fangby or his only master, Noland, came to tell us to get inside quietly and go to our dormitory.
During those long days, we would be visited twice, either by the hated bootboy or by Mrs Fangby. At lunch time, they would bring out a big toffee tin containing meat and lettuce sandwiches. At tea time, they would bring a tray with mugs of tea and perhaps buns. That was our day’s food. The meat in the sandwiches was inedible.
We cultivated our gardens, although we had never heard of Voltaire’s advice. It was possible in spring to take our pocket-money to a small shop just down the road from the school. Since the Victorian Age lingered in Norfolk until World War II, the shop was run by a lady in black called Miss Abigail. From Miss Abigail, penny packets of Carter’s seeds could be bought.
We tilled our strips and sowed them before the spring holidays. When we returned for the summer term, there among the weeds would be thin lines of lettuce, carrot, radish, and spring onion. These lines we tended with care. They were our food. We used them to eke out the meagre rations provided. And we ate, or at least bit into, the green apples on the trees.
The unripe apples provided useful ammunition, along with stones, in our wars against the local lads. The local lads hated us, and made the life of the dozen prisoners of St Paul’s as hazardous as they could. They would creep along the footpath which ran behind the field, to launch a stone barrage as we pottered about our garden strips. We fought back. We aimed to kill. When one of us was hit, we hushed it up and made excuses for any visible gashes.
Sunday was the day when the local lads triumphed, when our humiliation was greatest. For the fool Fangby, impelled to destruction by some folk-myth of decent schools which he had never seen, made his boarders dress in Sunday best. This meant black pinstripe trousers, black jackets, ties, and Eton collars. Eton collars are wide and stiff, permitting the wearer about as much freedom and comfort as an ox gets from a yoke. In this loathed outfit, and with the addition of straw boaters, the twelve of us were made to march in crocodile five miles to Mundesley Church for the morning service.
What a raree-show for the local lads. In their hobnails, cords, collarless shirts and braces, they would turn up to laugh and trip or kick us as we passed. It was a relief to arrive at the church.
Our hero for a few weeks was Legge. As we were passing the village pond, he managed to skim his boater into the middle of the duckweed. To get it out, we broke ranks and all became desirably muddied almost to the knee. In that state, we became less of a free advertisement for Mr Fangby’s menagerie.
I liked church. I had fallen in love with the local policeman’s daughter. We smiled at each other across the intervening pews. In her smile was forgiveness for the whole world of Eton collars.
In that church, gazing at the beautiful stained glass windows, I experienced the first of my eternal moments. Everyone was singing, and the policeman’s daughter was at the outer end of the pew on the opposite side of the aisle, so that we could exchange looks. Carried away by everything, I was filled with an oceanic feeling of happiness. ‘I will remember this moment all my life,’ I said to myself. And I have.
The picture of that moment returns easily. I can see the organ, the timbered roof, the choir, the stained glass. The view is an elevated one. The eternal part of me which took the snapshot was floating about twenty feet above my head.
The vicar’s name was Winterton. He had two sons, who came to St Paul’s at reduced rates. They were badly bullied at first. We chased them round and round the field and eventually buried them head first in a huge pile of grass clippings. Next term, they returned with avenging fury. Their father had been talking to them. Both were small. But they set upon us with sticks and terrified us. From then on, they drove us round the field at whim.
While the garden was one consolation, the library was another. Library was the name of the bookshelves behind the door of our classroom – it was more than a classroom, being the room in which we were trapped when we were not in the dormitory or exiled to the field. The misery of being back in that room for another term was stifled by being able to pick out The Captives of the Sea (or was it The Prisoners of the Sea?) and commence a re-reading. The story was sub-Dumas. I read it at the start of every term I was at St Paul’s.
Learning to be a gentleman is not something I recommend unless one has a natural bent for it. It included standing in an embarrassed line and singing such catches as ‘My Dame Hath a Lame Tame Crane’ and soppy songs like ‘The Ash Grove,’ ‘Fare Thee Well for I Must Leave Thee,’ ‘The