Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  And Mary would sniff and say that these were awful times they were living in.

  ‘It’s the end of the British Empire,’ Martin would respond. ‘India has let us down. Remember when the present king held his durbar in Delhi? What a show that was. Those times are gone for ever.’

  ‘Good old King George and Queen Mary,’ your mother exclaimed.

  ‘I’ve nothing against him, but what’s he ever done for the poor? Look at the miners.’

  And Mary would say, rather despairingly, ‘Martin, couldn’t we just talk about happy things?’

  ‘Like what?’ your father would ask.

  She would gesture. ‘Oh, can’t we ever laugh? I long for humour the way you long for a pork chop.’

  ‘You’re too superficial, that’s the trouble with you, dear.’

  Your little sister, detecting something frosty in the air, perhaps another cold row brewing, would bang heartily on a tin tray with a spoon, while shrieking at the top of her voice her favourite swear word, ‘Shuggerybees!’

  You often wondered where Sonia got her high spirits from.

  You were barely in your teens when you bought a book for twopence off a market stall. It was called The Old Red Sandstone. You were attracted by the title –

  I don’t remember it.

  Yes, you do. Your father approved, because the book was written by a working man who became a geologist, a rare achievement in early Victorian times. What fascinated you were such dramatic passages as, ‘At this period in our history some terrible catastrophe involved the sudden destruction of the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps far more. It exhibits unequivocally the marks of violent death …’

  Yes, I was thrilled by it, and by the idea of geology. Better than any fairy tale!

  It was to play a part in your later life.

  I don’t think so.

  We shall see, shan’t we?

  6

  Earth Sciences

  Before you were sent away to school – possibly the very reason why you were sent away to school – your remarkable sister Sonia had arrived in the world. Although she could never compare with Valerie, the perfect daughter, she immediately occupied your parents’ attention. Your mother doted on her, absorbing all her, somewhat fickle, attention.

  Your father, meanwhile, disliked displays of emotion. Perhaps his war injury reinforced his withdrawn character. Ignoring socialist principles, he sent you away to a nearby public school as soon as possible.

  One consolation in this form of exile was the weekly arrival of your favourite magazine, Modern Boy. In the pages of Modern Boy you followed the adventures of ‘Captain Castern of the South Seas’. Captain Mike Castern sailed a ketch about the Pacific Ocean. He had a crew of Kanakas, who would say of a dead man – and someone, generally wicked, died every week – things such as, ‘Dat man he go big sky blong Jesus.’

  At school, you developed an eccentric habit. There were certain senior boys whose looks were so peculiar in your eyes that you christened them with sentences from books you had been reading. That fellow with the swollen red face, suffering from some variant of acne rosacea, you dubbed, ‘Morning dawned, red and angry’. Another fellow was ‘The burly janitor replied’. Another was a thin fellow with a downcast air; he was christened, ‘He watched it drain away without regret’. Another lumbering fellow was ‘One excellence I crave’; but he left school early.

  A curious protocol about these phrases dictated that you had to utter them obsessively to yourself whenever you caught sight of the boy to whom they referred. Often – for instance when the whole school was filing into the school chapel – the phrases had to be mumbled quickly, one after the other. The habit served to distance yourself from the other boys. You had contracted a splinter of isolation from your father.

  You gave other boys of your own age, with whom you were more closely associated, exotic secret names, known only to yourself. You may recall Pyrodee Nangees, Trevor Birdshit, Fizure, Georgie Suckletrot and Gaspar de Peckubee. And a dull-looking day boy who became simply Fartadoo.

  This inventive turn of mind caused you also to form with a friend a secret clique of two, called ‘The Royal Society for the Overthrow of All Masters and the Government’. You and your friend were required to chant fifty times, ‘We the Murderers will Overthrow all stinking rotten Masters – pooh! – and the stinking rotten Gov’ment, too.’ The society flourished only for one term, to die of boredom since you were unable to dream up the means by which to execute your good intentions: although teams of well-trained cobras certainly entered into one of your proposals.

  Following the example set by Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone, you took to reading the strange books with strange titles you found in the library: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, On the Use of the Herb Slac, The Return of the Native (the native what, you wondered), and The End of the Imp, translated from the Russian.

  Among the strange books you were reading, cheek-by-jowl with Captain Castern, was one entitled The Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Thomas Browne. This volume contained many curiosities, including a paper on certain fossil remains discovered at Winterton. Winterton was the first place at which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked. It lies on the North Norfolk coast, not very far from Walcot.

  Browne, a seventeenth-century doctor, said: ‘Upon the same coaste, butt at some miles distance, divers great bones are sayd to have been found, & I have seen one side of a lower jaw containing very large teath petrified, farre exceeding the teeth of the biggest ox. It was found after a great flood neere to the cliff, some thousand loades of earth being broaken down by the rage of the sea.’

  Thomas Browne was mystified, as were you, by these great bones. Many years later, in the nineteen-eighties, the fossilized skeleton of a mammoth was found near Weybourne. Browne’s animal was very likely a mammoth too, possibly from the same herd.

  Your curiosity moved you to join a schools geological expedition in the summer holidays. A group of boys and masters were taken by ship to La Rochelle, from whence a coach conveyed you all inland to a small village called Beaussais. Outside Beaussais was an extensive dig, where the remains of a Roman villa that had been buried in an earthquake were being excavated. You all stayed in a small hotel just a kilometre away from the site.

  The dig had been roped off. Topsoil, on which grass grew, lay in piles outside the ropes. All that had been revealed of the villa so far was a paved pathway with a broken pillar standing at one end of the path. To one side, a radial ditch had been dug, leading nowhere. Your companions were excited. You felt only disappointment; you do not know what you had been expecting. A revelation of some kind?

  Your lack of enthusiasm was noticed by one of the masters superintending you. He was not from your school. His face was roughly the shape and colour of a plum. His hair was well-oiled and curly. He wore khaki shorts and heavy boots, with thin, hairy legs showing in the exposed area between them. His name was Mr Loftus.

  ‘Have you no interest in Roman villas?’ he asked.

  You thought, what was another Roman villa? but could not articulate the thought. You hung your head.

  ‘A mile from here there’s a more interesting site, where a meteorite struck. Would you be interested in looking at that?’

  His dark eyes regarded you rather contemptuously.

  ‘Yes,’ you said, although something in your head warned you to say no.

  You went with Mr Loftus, following him up the slope. The ground was broken and stony. No trees grew, only clumps of bracken and furze; it was a landscape scraped bare.

  Looking ahead at Mr Loftus’s hairy legs working their way onwards, and Mr Loftus’s boots, clumping along on your eye level, you conceived a hatred for all boots, reflecting that those who had power – the power represented by the boots – could do whatever they liked. You felt it to be your destiny always to be on an eye level with boots, plod, plod, plodding: boots with their studs, with t
heir horseshoe-shaped metal shodding. There was a feeling in your stomach, totally unformed by intellect, that in only a few years – three at most – the world would be full of the clamour of metal-shod marching boots.

  All your concerns about bursting into adulthood, a butterfly from a chrysalis – about how your career would go, about how you would earn money, about whether your friends liked you or secretly despised you – all those concerns would be kicked away by the legions of boots that even then were preparing to march in Germany, and out of Germany into neighbouring countries.

  I am surprised you know what I thought then. I hardly knew my own thoughts.

  They were deep within me.

  You are not surprised. Nothing can surprise you here.

  Yes, but those unspoken thoughts.

  They were recorded. There are no privacies, no surprises here.

  You climbed for about an hour before the ground levelled off. Mr Loftus continued to plod on, while you stopped to look at the view. From your vantage point, the country in the main looked flat. To the north, the serpentine bends of the river Niortaise gleamed in the sunshine. More distantly, the higher ground of the Sèvres region was obscured by a heat mist. Only faint noises arose from humanity below, challenged by nearer bird calls, plangent in the thin air. The sight of this beautiful sparse foreign land awoke vibrations within you.

  You walked now on bare rock. Mr Loftus stopped at last. The boots were at rest, the knees of the hairy legs companionable together. Mr Loftus mopped his brow with a blue handkerchief. A whisper of breeze was keeping the temperature down in this high place.

  ‘Here we are,’ he said. He was breathing heavily.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Few people know about this.’

  He indicated a wide hole in the rock. Cracks meandered in several directions from the crater, like tributaries running into the sea. The interior of the crater was more or less smooth, except where a portion had been cut away. A rusty pick lay beside the cut.

  ‘Get down in it, lad,’ he said.

  You did as you were bid, climbing into the rock. The lip of the crater came above your head, obscuring sight of anything beyond the crater but the blue sky. You recollected that experience much later in life. As you stared at the layered rock, Loftus explained what you were seeing. A thin broken dark band of what resembled rust separated two types of rock.

  ‘The burn marks where the asteroid struck.’ He squatted, so that his bare knees gleamed, to pick up a fragment and show it you. ‘We call this stuff breccia. A small asteroid came in from space and left this burn signature in the rocks. It struck about forty million years ago, long before France or mankind itself was thought of. See how the stratum above the burn is quite dark. Then comes lighter rock. There, fossils begin. Just a few. I’d guess this darker rock signifies at least five hundred thousand years of ocean which followed the asteroid strike.’

  He picked at it and laid a fragment in the palm of his left hand.

  ‘What are the fossils?’ you asked.

  ‘Nothing important. Squirrels. A thing like a present-day fox –’

  You listened to this matter-of-fact account, and all the while you were staring at the exposed rock face, the grits and stone of which Earth’s crust was composed, which would have meant nothing to ordinary people. Yet, given knowledge – the sort of knowledge you longed to acquire – a terrestrial drama lay before you. It was an enigma which, given knowledge, could meet with understanding. This was an explanation for the terrible catastrophe, the sudden destruction, which had puzzled Hugh Miller. A key turned in your mind.

  ‘It’s amazing, Sir,’ you said. ‘Everyone ought to know about this place!’

  ‘It’s not important,’ Mr Loftus said, indifferently. ‘It’s been examined and recorded. Hundreds of such impacts have been recorded all over the world. It goes to demonstrate what geologists already understand, that our planet, throughout the eons, has been constantly bombarded by comets, meteors, asteroids and assorted bits of rock.’

  You had never before heard anyone use the phrase ‘our planet’ for the Earth. It seemed to weaken you, to make your legs tremble.

  ‘All that time,’ you murmured.

  ‘From time immemorial up to the present day.’

  ‘But it is important, Sir,’ you insisted weakly.

  ‘No. Not in itself. It’s been recorded. Rock fragments have been analysed and their iridium content noted. It’s now an item in a ledger in the Paris Institute of Geology.’

  ‘Coo, I’d like to find something like this myself, Sir! What’s iridium?’

  Loftus went on to explain that the metal iridium was rare on the surface of the Earth, but abundant in the meteoritic dust arriving from space. You found it hard to tell from his attitude whether he believed you knew more of such matters than you did, or whether he thought you a complete ignoramus on whom further explanation was wasted.

  You were entirely taken up by this connection between ‘our planet’ and the objects which arrived from distant places beyond your most fervid imagining. You were seized by a glimpse of the solar system as a whole. A new light, you felt, was lit in your intellect.

  Yes, I think I did feel that.

  I’m telling you, you did.

  If only that light had not failed throughout many years of my life … Isn’t such knowledge, well, cleansing?

  In some cases, yes.

  Mr Loftus had pronounced the little crater to be without importance. But for you it was important; it set you on what was eventually to become your future career. You were not much interested in disinterring Roman villas; you wished to concentrate on the drama of battered ‘our planet’ itself, and of the creatures cast up on the beaches of existence upon it – for instance the creatures to be found in the old red sandstone.

  As Mr Loftus extended a hand to help you out of the dig, you stammered your gratitude to him for bringing you to this remote spot, which chthonic activity had raised high above the ancient sea bed.

  ‘You may care,’ said he, in his dry voice, ‘to remember the dictum of Goethe, who says, “Think in order to act, act in order to think.”’

  ‘Please, Sir, who is Goethe?’

  ‘Why, he is the great German thinker, boy. Johann Wolfgang Goethe.’

  Boy-like, as the two of you descended the hill, you again following the legs and the boots, you managed to assure yourself that you had discovered the importance of thought – of thinking about everything – long before this Goethe fellow came upon the scene.

  Also at your school was a cousin of yours, by name Thomas Sidney Wilberforce. You never knew him well and rarely associated with him. Something about him you found disturbing; boy-like, you did not attempt to discover what it was.

  Sidney was known to his class as ‘Sad Sid’. He had suffered much as you had done; whereas you had soon grown out of it, Sid never managed to do so. His parents, Jeremy and the skittish Flo, rather like your mother, had not wanted a son. Flo had ill-advisedly set her heart on a girl, a little girl she could dress in frilly petticoats and fancy dresses, to be an image of her own, younger self.

  Jeremy, gloomy by nature, became even gloomier at the sight of baby Sidney. He felt he had failed Flo. Indeed, his sense of failure had deepened during the war, when he had done nothing heroic, had never been in action. His war service had been spent on Salisbury Plain, organizing troop movements.

  Sidney soon became aware he was unwanted; he drank in that impression with his mother’s milk. He got up to mischief in order to draw attention to himself; the effect was merely to inspire further disapproval. In the market place one day, he happened to see a small girl in a pushchair, clutching a doll. Sidney snatched up the doll and ran off with it.

  Now began a painful performance where Sad Sid endeavoured to act the part of a little girl, pretending to make a fuss over the doll, which he christened Dribble. Flo and Jeremy, entirely without understanding, were disgusted by this display. Sidney hated the doll. Dribble became a symbol of h
is degradation. For that reason, he took it with him everywhere. When laid horizontally, Dribble uttered a faint cry and closed its staring blue eyes with a click.

  One day, you were invited over to play with Sidney. You did not wish to go, but Mary and Flo insisted you should be friends with Sid. You were baffled by Dribble. You would not hold it when Sid invited you to. Sidney dropped the doll on a hard floor. Dribble’s china head broke open. The crude mechanism operating the eyes was revealed.

  Sidney was appalled by what he had done. His face turned as pale as ashes. You stared down at the broken head in horror, thinking of your sister, Sonia. It was almost as if a murder had been committed: you asked to go home.

  There followed a row in the Wilberforce household, about which you heard only remotely. Your parents spoke of it in a whisper. It was Sonia who found out about it and told you. Sonia was quite excited. ‘Naughty!’ she said, eyes gleaming. ‘Shuggerybees!’

  Sidney had done what he could to sort out his sexual confusions. He had persuaded a small girl called Rose Brackett to come into the garden shed with him. Sid had kissed Rose and she had pulled her panties down. Sidney had his shorts off, when the shed door opened. Jeremy stood there, forehead drawn in a frown.

  ‘You dirty little tacker,’ he exclaimed. Grabbing Sidney by the collar of his shirt, he dragged him from the shed – poor Rosie Brackett was quite ignored and ran home crying – dragged him up the garden path and into the house, calling angrily for Flo.

  As Jeremy explained briefly what he imagined was taking place – shaking Sidney by the collar meanwhile – he gave the boy the odd cuff. With each cuff, he asked, ‘Where did you get that filthy habit from?’

  ‘It wasn’t filthy,’ cried Sid. ‘I never even touched her.’