Читать книгу Pale Shadow of Science - Brian Aldiss - Страница 6

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 Golden Vanity,’ ‘Cherry Ripe,’ and ‘The Keel Row,’ the words of which we 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 the immense field, stood Killy-Kranky, gazing out across the wire fence at liberty.

‘Look, there’s Killy-Kranky!’ I exclaimed. ‘Can I go and speak to him, Dad?’

‘What do you want to say to him?’ my father asked, contemptuously. Of course it was one of those adult questions which cannot be answered. We sped on our way.

After the beginning of one summer term, an Italian drove up St Paul’s shingle-strewn drive in a big car. He was tall, bronzed, elegant, well dressed. He came with Mr Fangby to speak to us in the classroom. We stuttered or were silent. He spoke excellent English and smelt of perfume. With him was his little son, aged five. The son was going to stay with us while his father went back to Italy, to resolve a few problems.

I still remember seeing that man embrace his son in the drive, squatting on his heels to do so. He gave him a child’s paper – probably Chatterbox – and kissed him fondly. Then he drove away.

We were so cruel to that boy. He wore a little blouse, with braces under it. This was cause for endless amusement. We teased him about it, about everything. We ran away with his Chatterbox, which he tried always to keep clutched to him, a symbol of his father. We excelled in being unpleasant. We made his life a misery. We made his every day a torment.

Why did we do it? Our triumph over the child was the most awful thing about St Paul’s. Years later, as an adult, I was wracked with guilt about our treatment of that Italian-Jewish child whose name eludes me. Why had we no compassion? Was it because we recognized in his father a civility superior to ours? Was it the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon way of life? Or was it something more basic, more cruel, in human behaviour?

The child’s only refuge was Legge, the other outcast among us. Legge’s popularity after the duckpond incident had not lasted. Tom had fought and beaten him, too. Unlike the bootboy, Legge could not escape, except to the upper branches of the apple trees. There he took the Italian boy, hauling him up like a gorilla with young. There they sat. Waiting for end of term and a release from misery.

Next term, the Italian boy did not reappear. My remorse did not develop till some years later, when I started to comprehend the world from an adult viewpoint. Compassion springs from a position of some security.

The assistant master, Mr Noland, was sacked. He went out and got drunk one night. Next morning, he refused to leave his bed. Fangby sent Tom to Noland’s room to command him to come down. The answer was a rude one. So Noland left at the end of the week. There were those who hung out of the window and cried openly as he drove off in his backfiring blue car. Those who had almost drowned at his hands experienced a certain relief.

It is easy to believe now that St Paul’s was more unbearable for adults – perhaps even for Fangby – than for its principal victims, the boys. Perhaps the rule applies to all prisons.

To cheer us up, Fangby took us out. He drove us over to Wroxham, where the bad meat came from, where there was a cinema. I still remember the excitement of being out that night, of speed, of seeing the willows flash by and vanish forever from the blaze of the headlights.

We went to see a film version of Lorna Doone, the boring novel of which we had read. The film was better. John Ridd fought Carver Doone, and Carver Doone fell back into an Exmoor bog and sank slowly down, down into the bog. It compelled our imaginations for a long while.

Legge was caught in his own personal bog. He did something which Fangby found unforgiveable. What it could have been still escapes conjecture. Was he caught smoking? I do not remember that any of us had cigarettes in a world where even ice cream was forbidden. Was he caught masturbating, or even in bed with another boy? With the Italian boy? It seems unlikely. We knew nothing about sex. We were still at an age when we were uninterested in our own or other penises. When Roger returned at the beginning of one term to say he had been in bed with his sister and she had told him that cocks went into the wee-wee hole and produced children, we were shocked by such coarseness, and gave him six with his own cricket bat.

Whatever it was Legge had done, he was treated like an absolute pariah. He was removed to a bare room in the attics and his clothes were taken away. The rest of us moved in silence and fear.

Then he was brought down among us to the classroom. Fangby announced that his crime was so great that it could not be mentioned. It meant that he was to be beaten and expelled. A similar fate would befall us if we did the same thing.

Legge was deathly white. He was told to drop his pyjama trousers and bend down. Fangby then proceeded to thrash him with a cricket stump. He laid on twelve strokes, putting all his porpoise-like strength behind them. One of our number fainted, another ran out crying and was dragged back, another was sick all over the floor and was made to mop it up later. Then Legge was helped away. We never saw him again.

Before that incident, I had not minded Fangby. There was at times a sort of cringing friendliness about the man, as if he might be afraid of us, or at least had some sympathy for our predicament. Now we all hated him. He had utterly estranged himself from us.

It was clear that to become gentlemen we had to undergo the same sort of treatment as Dr Moreau dished out to the Beast People on his celebrated Island. Fear and force make gentlemen. It is the Law.