The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss
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have been rumours of connections with the Norfolk Bullen (or Boleyn) family, who yielded up a wife for Henry VIII. This connection remains unsubstantiated.
More certain is that an old etymological dictionary gives our name as a corruption of ‘alehouse’. It sounds appropriate. The Aldiss family has always struggled through the centuries between alcoholism on the one hand and teetotalism on the other.
The progeny of a John Aldous, the first of whom was born in 1697, are variously registered as Aldhouse, Aides and Aldus. The first undisputed Aldiss is Thomas Aldiss of Beccles (christened 1726), who became a blacksmith and married a butcher’s daughter, Susan Creme of Diss.
A Thomas Aldiss was born in Lowestoft, on the Suffolk coast, in 1759, probably a son of the similarly named Aldiss of Beccles. He lived long and, like my paternal grandfather, like me, he ran to two wives. Thomas was a blacksmith. Evidently he prospered, or else married ‘above his station’. While his first marriage took place in Lowestoft, his second marriage, rather more grandly, took place in St Paul’s, in London.
Thomas handed down to posterity a few anvils and a number of progeny, six by his first wife, five by his second. One of the children by Thomas’s first marriage (to Elizabeth Brame) was Robert. Robert Aldiss continued the blacksmith and gunsmith trade in Lowestoft. He married Sarah Ann Goulder on the last day of January 1830, and between them they produced eight offspring.
Their oldest son, William, was born in the year of their marriage, in December 1830. This William Aldiss was my great-grandfather.
Draper William married Ann Doughty, of a well-known Norfolk family, in Swaffham in 1860. They had six children, of whom the oldest, Harry Hildyard, became my redoubtable grandfather.
H. H. was born in a house on the market place in Swaffham in 1862. The house still stands. He struck out on his own as a draper. In 1885, after the most dignified of courtships, H. H. married Elizabeth Harper, a farmer’s daughter. I have a Holy Bible H. H. presented her with, which has survived the storms of the years. His message in it is brief. It reads ‘Lizzie Harper. From H. H. A., as a token of his love. May 6th, 1881’. The message comes printed in gold, now faded, on a red label, increasing its air of formality.
My grandfather remains vivid in memory. He is a short, stocky man with a good, strongly featured face. His values are Victorian; above all, he is stern but just, his stern side ameliorated by a sense of humour – as when, in his role of JP, he fined his gardener five pounds for allowing his dog to chase a neighbour’s chicken. After the case, he slips his gardener a fiver, saying ‘After all, the dog was mine, and I couldn’t very well fine myself.’
From this time on, families are becoming less large, as health and sanitation improve. Elizabeth and H. H. had four boys: Reginald; Harry Gordon (my uncle Gordon); Stanley, my father; and Arthur Nelson, known as Nelson. There were two years between the birth of each child, Reginald being born in 1886, in Horncastle, as were his brothers.
Reginald died in the year of his birth. A stone stands to his memory in East Dereham churchyard.
The move to Dereham came some time before the First World War. There H. H. bought a failing drapery business and rapidly expanded it, assisted by his two surviving sons. H. H.’s youngest son, Nelson, was dead.
He died tragically. Mother often told us the story – we never heard of it from Father. Like Father, Nelson was educated at Bishop’s Stortford College. He was due to play in an important rugby match when he experienced severe stomach pains. He reported to the college sickbay, only to be told not to malinger. Next day, he collapsed on the pitch and was carried to hospital. There he died of a ruptured appendix, aged fourteen, another victim of the public-school spirit.
Perhaps H. H. and Elizabeth found there was no competition in the thriving little market town of Dereham. Certainly the firm of H. H. Aldiss Ltd prospered for some thirty years, from before the First World War until the Second. After the Second World War the business was sold off by Gordon’s son.
Yet the childish imagination experienced the Aldiss business as something as permanent as Stonehenge: and possibly remains affronted at its disappearance.
The premises stood in the High Street, looking up Norwich Street. It was in those premises that both my sister and I were born.
So the movie starts up again. It is 1925, still in the era of the silent film, and I come to the task of describing my own infant life.
My first five years are sealed in a time capsule. The capsule opens on the day of my birth, to close on 30 April 1931, some months before my sixth birthday.
As consciousness reaches out for the world beyond the cot, I find myself in a large flat above my father’s department of the shop, which is to say, the gents’ outfitters. Two of our rooms look eastwards, towards Norwich and the rising sun; they are above the front of the shop, facing up Norwich Street. Their windows are remembered as being many yards above the pavement. An astonishingly long corridor connects with a lounge at the rear. This lounge overlooks the shop’s busy yard and one of the entrances to the furnishing department, over which my uncle Gordon rules.
Near this rear end of the flat are clustered, on one side, a bathroom, a lavatory and a maid’s storage compartment (dark, polish-smelling, exciting), which contains a separate lavatory for the maid. The lavatory I unwisely invade at the age of four while the maid is enthroned – all in the interest of scientific curiosity. She is furious and later gets her own back.
On the other side of the long corridor are the kitchen, the pantry and another room, sometimes serving as a breakfast room, sometimes as a bedroom for a live-in maid. Further along the corridor towards the front of the flat are two bedrooms, the main bedroom, where my parents sleep in a double bed, and where a cot is sometimes accommodated, and a smaller room, all but attached to the larger. These two rooms are of immense importance: the centre of the universe, and therefore worth a pause as we look round them.
Both of these bedtime rooms, the larger and the smaller, face north. Like blind eyes, they have no view worth speaking of. In fact they look across the side entrance to the shop premises towards the uncommunicative sides of an old building.
The parental bedroom is where I am and, later, my sister is born. Between its two windows is a grate, where sometimes a coal fire is lit, for instance when I am ill. I have a memory of one such occasion when Dot has wrapped lumps of coal in newspaper during the day, so that she can add them to the fire silently during the night, without disturbing my sleep. The floor is covered with a shiny lino, cold to the feet. The lavatory is some distance away, so chamber pots wait under each side of the double bed. In this room, terrible infantile dramas take place. I will have to listen to screams of anguish from my sister as she resists having vests with tapes at the neck pulled over her head. Even darker things happen in this room, as will be related.
I am moved at an early age from my cot in this larger room to a bed in the smaller one. The bed remains in memory as almost insuperably high. At head and foot, its four posts are capped by elegant squares of wood. On the wall for my delight is a Rowntree study of bluetits among stalks of corn. A Price’s nightlight is provided for me, to stand guardian at night on the chest of drawers at the end of the bed.
It may be assumed from this that I was a pampered child; I was certainly a carefully guarded child; precautions were taken to keep me confined to the flat, and against this restriction I was in constant rebellion.
To the fortunate child (on the whole I was a fortunate child, though remarkably slow to realise the fact), the mother sings lullabies and nonsense songs. The child thus becomes acquainted with poetry and rhythm from the start. This is presumably how it was at the beginning of human life on Earth. The mother follows an archetypal pattern. In every literature, poetry precedes prose.
It must be understood that one’s bed takes some climbing into at first. Also that all doors are built unnecessarily tall, so that their handles are unreachable. All rooms are vast and full of strange smells and heavy objects. The corridor is so long that one can pedal up and down it madly on a red wooden scooter-affair.
Leading off the long corridor is a steep stairwell winding down to the shop and the outside