Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss
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copied into exercise books.
The gentlemanly arts also included football and cricket. Football was all right. Cricket was less satisfactory. With a maximum of twenty players, we could at best play with no more than ten a side. Despite which our parents had to provide us with full cricketing gear – white ducks and shirts, sweaters, caps, cricket boots. The worst ordeal of all was when Fangby decided that a St Paul’s team should play a local lads’ eleven.
To make it an event, lemonade was provided before play and between innings. We had to take the glasses round to the local lads. How they leered! Our ages ranged from seven to eleven or twelve, theirs from twelve to seventeen. They towered above us. They wore any old dress. The lad from the garage came in his overalls.
The match was a complete disaster. We sneered because they did not take up proper batting positions, whereas we, in our turn at the wicket, came up properly and asked for ‘Middle-and-leg.’ They batted first, and knocked us all round the field. But we had two good bowlers in Tom and Roger. Since the local lads were carelessly confident, they were vulnerable, and we got them all out for seventy-nine.
After a further round of humiliating lemonades, we went in to bat. The local lads closed in round us like a wall, smirking. The garage lad in his overalls took the bowling and was devastatingly violent. Nothing, of course, compared with the publican’s son who bowled from the other end. They made mincemeat of us. We were all out, wounded, for nine. But at least we were properly dressed.
One form of sport I took as an Extra. That Extra got me away from the school grounds once a week. It was generous of my father to pay for the Extra. Perhaps he felt for me in that captivity. At all events, every Monday I was allowed to walk unescorted down the road to a gentleman called Mr Field, who taught me riding.
Mr Field was a cheerful red-faced man. I liked him better than his horses. Nevertheless, as the lessons progressed, even the horses became less stupid. Then we would trot down Archibald Road on the spectacular beach which curved all the way round to Happisburgh and beyond, with never a soul on it. There we would gallop along in the foam, with the sun dazzling and the wind roaring in the ears. On, on, with a world uncluttered – indeed, about to dissolve into speed and light.
Unfortunately, the riding lessons did not last many terms. They stopped and no reasons were given. Maybe it was something I said.
One voluntary sport we endured was swimming. We learnt in geography lessons about the vernal equinox; it was, in Mr Fangby’s mind, the day on which swimming in the North Sea commenced. The North Sea throughout most of its career is a grey untrustworthy mass of chilled fluid, in which such alien entities as seaweed, shrimps, and jelly fish somehow contrive to make a living. It is not the natural element for boys of tender age – unless, of course, they are destined to become gentlemen.
On good days, the waves of the North Sea at Bacton, as they cast themselves in desperation on the shore, are not particularly large. But to a child of eight, not long accustomed to thinking of himself as a being apart from his teddy-bear, they are enormous. As you approach them, together with a dozen other blue-limbed disconsolates, they appear to open their mouths, display their sandy throats, and prepare to devour you.
If we did not enter this man-devouring medium with an affectation of eagerness, we were pushed or thrown in. This was not a job for Mr Fangby – whose porpoise-like form had an unporpoise-like aversion to water – but for the assistant master, Mr Noland. The logic of the operation was simple: one swam to avoid a watery grave. Those who pretended to drown were punished.
Despite the regime of starvation and ordeal-by-ocean, I do not recall anyone being ill at St Paul’s. There was none of this namby-pamby Jane Eyre stuff of dying of consumption. That would have been frowned upon.
Winters were harder to get through than summers. The greatest deprivation was loss of toys. Bullying and fighting remained as recreation, but I developed alternatives of my own.
One was the making of mazes. Throughout my three years’ incarceration at St Paul’s, my mazes became bigger and more elaborate. To be caught in one of them was to wander for hours in a tedium of bafflement. Yet they were popular, possibly because that tedium, volunteered upon, was preferable to the larger tedium which contained us.
I also made books. These were mainly notebooks with shiny red covers, bought from Miss Abigail for three-ha’pence. I stuck pictures in them, or wrote stories about enormous square machines which took people to the Moon, to their profit. A treasured microscope was permitted at school, since it was ‘scientific’; happy hours were spent poring down its tube, sketching things twitching in a drop of pond water or wild-life moving on someone’s hair. These sketches went into books.
A rival to the popularity of the microscope by day was the kaleidoscope by night. I smuggled a small pocket kaleidoscope back to St Paul’s, and a torch. Homesickness was worst at night. It could be conquered by snuggling down into the bed and shining the torch up the kaleidoscope. Hours were spent over long winter nights, watching the tumbling patterns of colour. The pattern never repeated, one’s eye never wearied.
We also traded cigarette cards. More esoteric were the adhesive pictures to be collected from penny bars of Nestlé’s milk chocolate. These were divided into various categories, such as birds (a bit boring), machines (good), famous explorers (okay, especially Mungo Park, because of his funny name), and prehistoric monsters (best of all). Another point of interest was that Nestlé’s – presumably in the cause of a rapidly disintegrating world peace – printed the text in English and Esperanto.
Several of us were interested in the idea of Esperanto. Latin was boring, because dead, but Esperanto was of the present, an invented language. For a penny, one could buy a special Nestlé’s album in which to stick the pictures. There was more Esperanto. We set ourselves to learn it. Progress was rapid on some fronts, since the Esperanto for Brontosaurus is Brontosauro.
A child’s world in the thirties was not knee-deep in dinosaurs, as is the world of the enviable child today. How can any child be miserable when Hanna-Barbera throws the beasts at you in full animation almost every week-day and twice on Sundays? Time was when you had to hunt to turn up a dinosaur in black-and-white. I slowly acquired works of reference. Particularly valued was A Treasury of Knowledge, which my father had from the Daily Mail by clipping out coupons.
I began to feel I knew something. It was an illusion, but a strong one, and during my later days at St Paul’s I gave lectures on Prehistoric Monsters for one penny per attendee. Nobody ever stumped up, as far as I remember, but at least the charge stood as a kind of guarantee of everyone’s seriousness. My pupils took notes and had to draw a diplodocus every week (side view only – nobody had seen a diplodocus from the front in those days, not even Nestlé’s).
Dramatic distractions were few. The best was when brave Tom, our head boy, decided he had had enough of the insufferable bootboy. One dull Saturday afternoon, when we were kicking our heels in the classroom, the bootboy was invited up, and Tom told him to fight if he was not a coward. It was done in the best traditions of English boys’ school stories. Tom and the bootboy took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, brandished their fists, and set to.
It was a desperate conflict. The bootboy was much bigger and thicker than Tom. But Tom had made up his mind. They slammed at each other furiously. The fight carried through to the landing, and then to the narrow, winding stair. With a final flurry of blows, Tom knocked the bootboy down the last few steps. He fell backwards to the floor, his mouth bloodied, and lay looking up at us. Tom flung his jacket down at him. He grabbed it and slunk away.
The weeks of our incarceration passed, Hitler grew bolder. Echoes of that larger world reached our backwater. We had a German-Jewish boy whom we called Killy-Kranky. He was lively and comic and popular because he taught us German swear-words and insults. ‘Du bist eine alte Kamel!’ was, we were assured, a terribly rude thing to say. We treasured the knowledge; I at least have never forgotten it, my first sentence in German.
Poor Killy-Kranky! His parents disappeared. He had to stay on at school in the holidays. One day in the summer holiday, my father drove our family past St Paul’s. There, in a corner of