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although I detect no change in their proportions. To start up the vehicle, Father produces a double-angled key, inserts it under the front bumper and with enormous effort produces a faint coughing from the engine – polite at first, then furious at being disturbed. Exciting blue poisonous gas fills the garage. I love the smell of it and inhale deeply. The car runs on Father’s favourite petrol, Pratt’s High Test.
Behind the garage stands the engine room, where the shop’s electricity was once generated. Here is a huge brutal machine with pistons, levers and gauges, all unmoving and unmovable. It is silent now. Its day has come and gone: after the dinosaur, company electricity.
The outside passage to the left of the engine house is narrow and threatening. On its other side is a slim-shouldered wooden door, set in a crumbling brick wall. Once the door was painted red. Now it is a sort of shabby rose, and flakes of old paint can be picked off with a fingernail. It has a funny wooden bobbin latch – all part of a bygone day we cannot decipher.
Go through this door and here’s another puzzle from the past. A narrow lane with a gutter running down the middle, which ends in a brick wall; it is a little street leading back to Victorian times. To the left is a high brick wall, the wall marking the end of the drapery department. And to the right … a row of low, two-storey terraced cottages, three of them, with bobbins at each door. Creepy though it is, the brave can still enter the cottages, can even venture up stairs that creak horrendously as you go, to peer out of the tiny upper windows.
Not only are the cottages almost certainly haunted, they are stuffed with ungainly goods. Black enamelled bedsteads, for instance, wrapped about with twisted straw, babies’ cots enclosed in sisal. Here too reposes a huge old wicker Bath chair with two yellowing tyred wheels. The cottages are now stores, demoted and outmoded.
You creep away and come back to the yard. The yard is wider here, leading to the stables. On the right is the Factory, built, Norfolk-fashion, of knapped flints interspersed by rows of brick which mark its three storeys. Against the factory walls is my sandpit where I play. I build castles with tunnels sweeping through them. I use woodlice – ‘pigs’ – as the inhabitants of these fortifications. Sensing that they may not entirely enjoy this occupation, since I have woken them from cosy sleeps under stones, I make a vow to the woodlice that, if they will play with me, I will be kind to them for the rest of my life, and never kill a single one.
Over sixty years, I have kept my vow. Indeed, a tribute to ‘pigs’ is paid in Helliconia Winter, where they are called rickybacks, a more friendly name than woodlice. Rickybacks survive for thousands of eons on Helliconia, as woodlice have done on Earth.
There’s a fence opposite the Factory. Behind this fence is our garden. That is to say, Dot and Bill’s garden, some way distant from the flat, but much enjoyed by Dot. Father has bought her a summerhouse. It looks across the lawn towards the row of cottages.
These old cottages were built for the live-in staff, not of H. H., but of his vanished predecessor. Conditions in those little rooms must have been primitive. The gutter in the middle of their lane indicates as much.
Dot is fond of the garden and spends some time there, occasionally sighing and wishing she were as free as a bird. When her mother, Grandma Wilson, or Cousin Peggy comes to stay, we sit in the summerhouse. Grandma in still in her widow’s weeds, and remains that way until her death. I practise reading to her.
Dot furnishes it as if it is her doll’s house. She subscribes to Amateur Gardening, which gives away colour prints of flowers, generally flowers flopping about in bowls and vases. At least once a month, one blossom is seen to have fallen from its bowl on to the surface of a highly polished table. Mother cuts these pictures out and frames them in passe-partout – words to which I am for a time addicted, learning the eccentric way in which they are spelt. Dot hangs her pictures in the summerhouse.
My cousins and I are naughty. If The Guv’ner catches me, I get a yardstick across the back of my bare legs. Sometimes Bill gives me a more ceremonial whacking. I do not cry. What I most dislike is that afterwards he squats down to make me shake hands with him and announce that we are still friends.
God also gets fed up with my naughtiness. As gods will, he devises more subtle tortures than any mere father can. In the garden stands a low-growing thorn tree. I rush into the garden one day, shrieking. Possibly I am three, a peak shrieking time. I find two of the yard dogs there, growling furiously. They have chased one of the yard cats into the thorn tree. The cat crouches on a branch, looking down at the dogs, just out of reach of their snapping jaws.
My arrival startles the cat. It decides to make a run for it. Leaping from the tree, it has gone only a few feet before the dogs are on it, baying with fury.
Next moment – in the words of Handel’s Messiah, ‘Behold, I show you a mystery … we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.’ The cat is changed in the twinkling of an eye. It becomes meat. It becomes an incoherent red mess, stretching, stretching, as the two dogs rush past me, each fastening on to a strand of flesh, running off growling in parallel.
For many months this terrifying image, and the guilt attendant on it, dominated not only my waking hours.
For ever after there was to be,
… that sorrow at the heart of things
which glides like water underneath thin ice,
Bearing away what is most innocent
To darkness and the realm of things unseen,
Lending our joys a meaning never meant.
Dogs were everywhere.
Bill and Dot, in their carefree days before children overtake them, keep Airedales. They breed them and at one time have fourteen. At shows around Norfolk and Norwich they win prizes. These are their happy times, before my arrival, even before the steel-engraving angel. Just beyond my sandpit stands a shed, later to be a tool shed, in which Dot boils up sheep’s heads and oats with which to feed the dogs.
Occasionally, after closing, Bill and Gordon would organise a rat hunt in the outbuildings, and send the dogs in. What a fury of barking! Into blackest corners rush the terriers, emerging with grey bodies clamped between their jaws.
The dogs are sold off one by one. Only an old lady, Bess, is kept as a faithful pet. When I am an infant of no more than a year, Bill and Dot are busy. I learn to walk – this is family legend, not a real memory – by clinging to Bess’s tight curls. Patiently the old dog goes forward, step by step. Step by step, I stagger with her.
When Bess dies, Dot buys a smooth-haired terrier we call Gyp. Faithful Gyp! He can be induced to pull a big wooden engine down the length of our corridor.
H. H.’s premises are a child’s ideal adventure playground. Full of horror as well as pleasurable excitement. I can be wild for a whole hour before tea time. My favourite film actor is Tom Mix. Tom Mix, the great cowboy star, and his horse Tony perform an amazing stunt. I talk about it for months.
Mix is being pursued by a whole gang of bad men in black hats. They are drawing closer, but he might escape by galloping across the railroad. Unfortunately, at that moment, along comes a freight train with many trucks, winding slowly across the prairie. It looks as if it’s all up with Tom Mix.
But happily – in the nick of time! – there’s one, just one, flat truck in the middle of the train. Without a pause, Mix spurs on Tony, crouches low over the gallant animal’s neck and – wowee! – they jump right over the moving flat car and are away to safety.
Much as I admire Tom Mix and other cowboys, I want not to be a cowboy but an Indian. For one birthday – but perhaps this lies on the far side of the Five Year Abyss – I am given a Red Indian suit, plus head-dress with coloured feathers (far too bright for realism, I think), a tomahawk, and a bow and arrows.
What I do with the arrows gets me into hot water. But an Indian brave can always climb and trees are meant to be climbed.