The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss
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at the wider backcloth of English history which commenced in time out of mind, and is still in the weaving.
Noel Boston & Eric Purdy
Dereham, the Biography of a Country Town
East Dereham is a peaceful place. Sleepy, some might say. It is a small market town, of some importance in the district. In the twenties and thirties, the cattle market was much alive. The bellowing of ill-treated animals filled the town every Friday.
When I was bustling through it with hoop and top, Dereham still had about its chops the brown gravy stains of the Victorian era. The High Street was illuminated by gas. As night fell, the lamplighter trudged along with his hooked pole, to catch one of the two rings on the gas jet which, when pulled, lit the mantle. The pallid gaslight was like an apparition: ghastly the faces of all who passed beneath.
The magnificent George Borrow, who was born in Dumpling Green, speaks of East Dereham as a ‘dear little place’. It is also a place with its share of horrors. Opposite the façade of H. H. Aldiss’s emporium, two shops stand on either side of the corner of Norwich Street. One is a butcher’s shop, run by Charlie Bayfield (admired and scorned by Bill in equal amounts); often drunk. On the other corner is a grocer, Kingston & Hurn, much frequented by Dot.
Just up from Bayfield’s is Fanthorpe’s music shop, where The Guv’ner buys me a wind-up gramophone for my sixth birthday. The gramophone comes with six records (‘Impressions on a One-String Phone Fiddle’, etc.). Beyond Fanthorpe’s stand the huge double wooden gates to Bayfield’s slaughterhouse. I watch as cattle are driven – whacked – down Norwich Street towards the gates of hell. Men shout at the animals. Although I am repeatedly told that cows never suspect what is about to happen to them, I remain un-reassured.
In they go, poor beasts, hooves slipping on greasy cobbles in their haste. They are forced inside the abattoir. The doors close behind them. Bellowings are heard. Scuffles. Thuds. Silence. All is over. Then blood begins to flow in a torrent beneath the double gates into Norwich Street. A red stream, a tide carrying pieces of straw with it, rushes in the gutter towards our shop. It disappears into a drain outside Charlie Bayfield’s sawdusty door.
Again a sense of incredulity. Could that stream be poured back into the cows, to make them live again?
Dot takes me and Gyp shopping. We meet someone Dot knows. The two women are immensely friendly. As they stand chatting, I bask in all the benevolence flowing between them. Dot is happy for once. This is how life should be. They part, seemingly with reluctance. Directly the other woman has gone, Dot is vicious.
‘Oh, how I hate that woman. What a hypocrite and liar she is, what a snake in the grass!’ So Dot cannot be trusted. Appearances deceive.
You cannot distinguish between adults telling the truth and adults lying. I do my best to faint. No luck.
Dot is friendly – or she pretends to be – with Nellie Hurn. She often takes me through the pleasant-smelling grocery shop, through a mirrored door, into Hurn’s private hall. Nellie, like us, lives upstairs. The stairs are dark. Everywhere is stained brown, adding to the darkness. I enjoy the thrillingness of this, and kick the brass stair rods that hold the stair carpet in place as we go up. Dot reproves me. She calls ‘Coo-ee!’ as we ascend. Comes a faint answering cry.
Nellie Hurn lives in the front room, which is entered through a bead curtain. It is like coming suddenly on the Orient. The beads hang there, multicoloured rain suspended in mid-fall. They are strange, confusing, as we push through them. Inside a dark room sits Nellie – sits or rather reclines in an adjustable chair. Nellie is pale from playing too much patience at a round brass Benares table. She smokes a black paper cigarette while gazing frequently out of the window.
I too gaze out of her window while the women talk. There stands our shop, H. H., with the windows of our flat above. So supposing I could get back there very quickly, terribly quickly, would I be in time to see myself staring out at myself at Nellie Hurn’s window?
Dot and Nellie sip tea from delicate cups with serrated edges. Dot takes her tea with sugar and without milk, whereas Bill takes his with milk and without sugar. For some years I believe this to be a sexual difference: all men do it one way, all women do it the other.
I never see Nellie outside her dark room, exempted from the world by that curtain of suspended raindrops. We visit other women in the town who also spend their years reclining, as though some nerve in their minds has been fatally sprained.
Kingston & Hurn specialise in teas. Dot buys it in packets which are made up at the counter. The tea is weighed, poured on to a flat piece of paper. The assistant smartly knocks this paper up into a box, folds it, seals it neatly, Bob’s your uncle. I long to have a try.
On one occasion, Kingston & Hurn promote Mazawattee tea. In their window they erect an advertisement which moves. There, larger than life, but of painted wood, sit Alice, the doormouse (asleep) and the Mad Hatter, at the tea table. The Mad Hatter pours tea from a huge red teapot. Alice holds out her cup then drinks from it, smiling with satisfaction. She then holds out her cup for more, and the Mad Hatter pours again. Alice drinks, still smiling.
She will drink and smile for ever. The Mad Hatter will pour for ever. He is relentless and will forever pour, and she forever drink, the tableau like a ghastly parody of John Keats’ Grecian Urn, the tea and they
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever drinking and for ever drunk …
I stand there, nose to the glass. Dot drags me home. But I can run upstairs to watch the display across the road. From our front window I get a good view.
They are still at it. The big red teapot is still dispensing its pretend Mazawattee. He still pretends to pour, and she to drink, pour and drink. The model works by electricity. But I think to myself that possibly Alice and the Mad Hatter have feelings: since they look human, perhaps they feel human. Perhaps they are forced to pour and drink, pour and drink – and all the while, smiling, they don’t wish to.
The existential dilemma overwhelms me. I cannot think my way out of the riddle. This enforced behaviour – all this enforced smiling – has wider and uncomfortable implications.
Of course I understand that this advertisement is simply a construct. But the incident of the cat torn apart ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ shows how narrow is the threshold between living and non-living things.
So supposing the figures are thirsty and want real drink while having pretend drink forced on them from that hideous red teapot …
And after all, we humans go on day by day, doing the same things automatically. Supposing we merely think we are real, the way Alice does in Hurn’s window. Suppose our feelings, like Dot’s, are insincere …
Are we stuck in a window with God outside, watching us go through the motions?
I am haunted by the Mazawattee Tea Paradox, Schrödinger’s Cat made flesh, or at least three-ply.
Dereham appears to be a God-fearing place. The religious habit in the late twenties and early thirties of the century is bound up with memories of the war, still fresh in people’s minds, and therefore with the social life of the country, and so with a patriotism that is now, at the end of our century, greatly diluted – probably for the better, the xenophobic element being also diluted.
In the United States, religion, or at least a frequent reference to the Almighty, is similarly bound up with social life, patriotism and big business (What’s good for God is good for General Motors). A kind of official optimism is also involved. Whereas in Britain the prevailing mood is more one of scepticism. It suits us better. The garment is cut according to the cloth.
This is well illustrated on Armistice Day, 11 November, commemorated with due ceremony.
The film is here an old documentary. For its viewers it is over in a few seconds; for those involved it is a caesura in their lives, rendered more weighty by that sense of time dragging its feet which important events engender. It is raining slightly. Dot puts on