by Brian Aldiss
The fact was that many or most people nowadays lived an indoor life, although the thought patterns of Ancient Greece had been generated through a more outdoor and sunlit existence. Did that matter? Or did not the effect of an indoor existence, lived among small rooms accessible through narrow doorways, bring its own mental shortcomings?
A priest visited you in your cell. He could not answer such questions when they were put to him. But he told you that he deplored the prison system. You were inclined to disagree; you had begun to feel you were making moral progress.
For all that, the days became longer, the weeks dragged, the grey months spun themselves out, the year passed with all the sloth of a glacier, inching its way to the sea …
2
Guernica
PAMPHLET: ‘At this time, in a situation so remote from the metropolis, everything is as silent as it would be in a region wholly uninhabited. The moon shone bright; and the objects around being marked with strong variations of light and shade, gave a kind of sacred solemnity to the scene … They had not ridden far, before a hollow wind seemed to rise at a distance, and they could hear the hoarse roarings of the sea. Presently the sky on one side assumed the appearance of a reddish brown, and a sudden angle in the road placed the phenomenon directly before them. As they proceeded, it became more distinct, and it was at length sufficiently visible that it was occasioned by a fire. Mr Falkland put spurs to his horse; and, as they approached, the object presented every instant a more alarming appearance. The flames ascended with fierceness; they embraced a large portion of the horizon; and as they carried up with them numerous little fragments of the materials that fed them, impregnated with fire, and of an extremely bright and luminous colour, they presented some feeble image of the tremendous eruption of a volcano.
The flames proceeded from a village directly in their road. There were eight of ten houses already on fire, and the whole seemed to be threatened with immediate destruction.’
It is all darkness, all fire, all pursuit and persecution. Injustice prevails, oppression is a system, terror ubiquitous. I read this book over and over. I write about it. No one will accept what I write. Can I be alone in perceiving the truth of what William Godwin wrote then, and what exists now? This indeed is things as they are.
This little island; think of it. Think of it sunk in an eternal war. Once a new tribe swarmed here, over our marshes and ditches and thickets. They grew into armies; those armies stormed down on the tiny towns of the period; on York, on Lincoln, on Peterborough, on Wells. Everywhere they went they killed or converted. They were called Christians. The country burned under their banners. They had no mercy. Prayer was their battle cry.
But spare no pity for those they conquered – those people were savages. They lived in filth and drank from puddles. They did anything vile. The men sold and slaughtered women as they did cattle.
Some of those who survived pleaded for mercy from the Christians. There was furtive intermarriage; the marriage of hyenas to jackals. And, as has been done ever since, the Christians built monuments to their war. They constructed stone cathedrals. Some of these memorials still stand. They were built on the edge of unconquered lands, as warnings to the enemy. Ely Cathedral confronts the wild Fens. Similarly, the religious in those states which once went under the name of Byzantium built their churches to face, and outface, the Ottoman lands.
This is the custom. Picasso painted his great canvas, Guernica, to commemorate similar atrocities: when the Nazi Condor squadrons utterly obliterated that quiet Basque town of Guernica. So every village in England erected a memorial to the slaughter of the Great War, preserving the names of humble villagers who died in it. Now the Americans are making a movie, Apocalypse Now, to celebrate the horrors of the Vietnam War. Every age has its own style.
All these monuments are to remind people of the savage past and of their own savage present. How did we win the war against Nazi Germany? Because most of the men pressed to fight for this country – men like my father – were inured to hardship, lived miserable and constricted lives, had such low expectations. Not the officer class, of course, but the officer class had been incarcerated in public schools, institutions expressly designed to harden them, to mould their inmates into bullies, captains and moustached majors.
Now we have won that struggle, we invite some of those who fought on our side to come and work for us at menial jobs. I refer to the Jamaicans, a jolly unruly sort of people, instant anathema to the majority of British citizens on the grounds that their skins are black, their songs of sexual liberality. Here’s a new people to persecute!
So this nation, which contains more drunkards, more syphilitics, more pregnant unmarried mothers than the rest of Europe combined, claims to be a pure race. What can be greater or grander than to be an Englishman?
Daniel Defoe put that matter into perspective:
In eager rapes and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-breed race there came,
With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly run
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.
And those who do not fuck are never chaste
But claim frigidity of higher taste:
The wish to be superior runs
Like semen over England’s sons.
Defoe with my help, yes!
With things as they are, there is no escape. Those imprisoned under our systems of ‘justice’ are more victims than villains – the innocent who get gulled, the weak who get led astray, the orphaned who have never known security. Those who escape imprisonment are forced by circumstance to take advantage of others.
It is not that there is Good or Evil in the world: there is only Necessity; necessity the millstone, necessity driving us over the barren heath.
CALEB
3
One of the Poor
You found yourself, in the middle of this, your mortal life, wandering in that area of London where Finsbury merges with Bethnal Green, and Shoreditch lies to the north. It was a poor part of London, the refuge of many failed or oppressed lives. Broken pavements, impoverished terraces and pokey shops marked the area.
At the end of the 1960s, when many claimed that London was still swinging, this area had become the target for town planners, anxious, in the name of respectability, to improve appearances.
The sands of time had passed slowly through their narrow-waisted glass. The American astronaut Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon during the final days of your incarceration. You had hardly noticed. Now you worked in Scrutton Street, where you had taken a job as a packer in a warehouse after twenty-six months in prison. Your employment was rendered the more uncomfortable by the way in which your fellow employees had discovered that you were a ‘jailbird’, whose wings had been clipped, and resolved to treat you accordingly, sometimes in scorn, sometimes in fear, always with an attitude.
Currently, you were delivering an invoice to an office a few streets away. Drab though the streets were, your eye, accustomed to the greys of prison, was caught by splashes of colour; a shop sign, a red pillar box, a striped awning, a florist with bright bouquets of flowers placed on the pavement. You walked slowly, digesting these sights of freedom, when a notice, executed in pokerwork on a small board, claimed your attention. The notice read ‘G. & H. Geldstein, Flats for Rent, Second floor.’
Your condition had greatly changed. You had felt yourself victimized. As the due processes of the law untangled themselves in various lawyers’ offices and in court, you saw that the attractions of making money ha
d lured you into a system whereby others made money at your expense. The really significant amounts of currency had gone into Lord Lyndhurst’s purse, filtering, with rather less reward, by a trickle-down effect, into the systems and pockets of Joey and Terry Hillman.
As the evidence piled up against you – for who else had signed numerous documents ceding money to various fictitious companies? – you had felt indignantly that you were simply an innocent bystander caught in a system you did not bother to comprehend.
However, in the cool of your cell, you had had time to think the matter through; you came to different conclusions. Those conclusions, although not flattering, were arrived at by intellect. They condemned you for foolish greed. You had not regarded it as grasping at the time, but grasping it was, even if you had been surrounded by systems of greater greed generated by others. You thought often of the foxes at Chateau Aulnoy, devouring the swans on the ice. The greedy certainly included your cousins, Joey and Terry, who had escaped the law entirely; they also included your wife, Abby.
You had dreamed a prodromic dream in prison in which your marriage to Abby was dead. Abby had left you as soon as the verdict had gone against you. She had sold her couturier’s shop for a healthy profit and had taken Geraldine away to live on her parents’ estate near Birdlip Hill in Gloucestershire. In your chastened state of mind, you were not unhappy to be free of Abby; Abby had been a character in your illusion. The little girl was remote from you.
You were free to consider how greatly you had been misled by various illusions; by the stillborn sister, Valerie; by the mirage of a prosperous life with a classy, blue-eyed woman; above all, by the false security of your holidays on Walcot sands.
You were now preparing to begin life, if not anew, in a more frugally-oriented state of mind; the prospect excited you. And first of all you needed a roof over your head, away from your unfriendly associates at the warehouse; a place in which to study.
Eventually, you were to forgive Abby. And, having forgiven her, realize there was nothing to forgive. Lust and circumstance had thrown you together, something not greatly different had caused you to part. As to which was the stronger, the accident of character or the accident of circumstance, that was hard to say. You had read somewhere that in infancy it is fate that moulds character, and in adulthood character that moulds fate.
Unsatisfactory, no doubt, but close to the truth. As close as one ever got to that abstraction …
But what was fate doing with little Geraldine?
It was hardly to be expected that you were jubilant as you climbed the creaking stair, which turned a narrow corner to the door of the office of G. & H. Geldstein, on the first floor above the cycle shop in Scrutton Street. You felt you had overcome a baser part of your character, and were now ready to face the next adventure in your life.
You tapped at the door on the landing and were invited to enter. You found yourself in a smallish room overlooking the street. It was poorly lit; an overhead light was burning. The room contained a table and desk, and a bookcase untidily full of books and papers. A map of the area hung on the distempered wall. At the table near the door sat H. Geldstein and at the desk sat G. Geldstein.
G. Geldstein was on the phone, talking and gesticulating. He glanced up at you but gave no sign of recognition. H. Geldstein asked you if she could help.
You stared at her. She stared at you. She had grey eyes in a pale face. Her hair was dyed blonde. She wore a navy blue jumper and had bright red fingernails.
‘Helge!’ you exclaimed.
At that, she stood up. ‘Steve?’ she asked in a hushed voice.
You could only nod. She rushed round the table and you embraced each other, calling each other’s name.
The man at the desk put down the phone. He wore glasses over his pale eyes. He was almost bald. He stared across the desk, standing with his hands on it for support.
‘Steve? It is Steve Fielding, no? I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!’
‘It is, it’s our Steve!’ Helge cried. ‘From the French forest!’ Tears ran down her cheeks. She stroked your face. Then Gerard came out from his desk and also embraced you.
‘My dear boy, we thought you were dead! Thought you had been shot!’
He was sobbing. By contagion, Helge began to cry noisily. You too cried, making up the trio.
‘People have thought that before. Luckily, you’re all mistaken. I’m alive and kicking. And you? And the children?’
All three of you were crying and smiling and laughing. Gerard was looking much older, yet he executed a little caper. He removed his spectacles to mop his cheeks and stare at you with those strange eyes of his. ‘Too much, too much …’ he kept saying. ‘We were so upset when you disappeared. We felt the conviction that the Krauts had got you.’
Your escape from the forest had not been forgotten. ‘My dear friends, I feel so bad that I deserted you. But once I was in that confounded German car … I remembered then that I was an officer in the King’s army. I felt I had to get back to England. England in the toils … But, please forgive me for leaving you behind.’
Gerard clasped your hand. ‘Do not feel like that. You had to do your duty. That we understand.’
‘And England – now we understand that,’ said Helge, between tears and laughter. ‘Its sort of kindness – at least it lets you alone! Those were such desperate times,’ said she. ‘If the Germans gave you a car …’
But you thought you saw that, despite their protestations, they did resent your abandoning them. You inadvertently shook your head.
A moment’s silence settled on them. Then Gerard spoke.
‘I will lock up the premises, my friend, and we shall go and sit in the Queens Café down the street, and sit and drink some wine and talk all about ourselves and –’
‘And how it is by some miracle that we all three happen yet to be alive,’ said Helge, finishing her husband’s sentence.
Gerard tucked his spectacles into his breast pocket, switched off the overhead light, and ushered you and his wife out before him. Once outside the door, he turned and locked it with a brass key. How you were smiling, could not help smiling.
‘Oh, to think I’ve found you again!’
All three of you went down the turn in the creaking stair and on to the pavement and along until you reached the Queens Café; there you entered. Gerard shook hands with his friend the manager and you made your way to a little cubicle at the rear of the room, where the seats had high backs like church pews. You sat down, still unable to stop smiling at each other. The manager brought a lighted stub of candle and, without being asked, a bottle of red wine and three glasses. You drank each other’s health, clinked your glasses, drank again, and then clutched one another’s hands across the table.
‘It’s wonderful!’ you said. ‘Wonderful! I’ve always wondered what happened to you – and here you are, alive and kicking …’
‘And also owing me money too,’ said the manager, interrupting. He was a plump man, wearing a stained white waistcoat over his stomach. He was standing in the aisle, leaning against the high back of your seat, smiling genially to see his happy customers. ‘They must remain alive until they have paid me all back!’ He roared with laughter.
‘Take no notice of him,’ said Geldstein, with a flourish. ‘He is Harry Heflin, only the father-in-law of my daughter, Brenda.’
‘What? Brenda’s married?’ you exclaimed.
‘And expecting,’ said Helge. ‘She’s twenty-eight, you know. Twenty-eight years and a-half-a-year. How the years fly by!’
Yes, how the years had gone, you thought, as you plunged into reminiscence. The longer you looked into their faces, the more familiar they became. They were now more lined, yet these were the faces of those on whom you had depended for company and affection during the long, shipwrecked months in the French forest. To be again in their company was to feel that affection renewing itself, flowing in like a tide.
Speaking in chorus and alternately, Helge a
nd Gerard told their story. Once you had left the hideout to dispose of the German vehicle and had not returned, they had become anxious. The fear was that the Nazis had captured and tortured you, and would soon be coming in force to scour the forest near Le Forgel. With the cooperation of Palfrey, they had moved with the kids further into the forest, only to be captured by a bunch of French Resistance fighters.
‘Pretty grim men,’ said Helge, with a giggle and a shiver.
The fighters had not known what to do with the family. At first, the Geldsteins feared they were to be shot; Helge’s German accent told against them. It was the children, Pief and Brenda, who saved the day. Resistance fighters did not shoot children. Eventually, they had conducted the family to a small hamlet in what was regarded as a safe zone.
‘We travelled hidden under straw in a cart drawn by an ox,’ said Helge. ‘Pief hated it because he said the straw tickled. Poor boy, he sneezed all the way.’ She began to cry again.
After two nights of travel, they arrived at the hamlet of Saint-Aubin, near the River Semnon. There they lived in a cottage, protected by some of the Resistance fighters. Among these fighters was a schoolmaster from St Malo who gave the children some tuition. Once the Soviets entered the war against Germany, local Wehrmacht patrols became rarer, and life passed uneventfully until the war ended. They had managed to get to England with the financial assistance of Harry Heflin, who was a relation by marriage to a cousin of Gerard’s.
‘They are forced to eat in my café to pay me back,’ interposed Harry Heflin, who had gone to the front of his premises but kept coming back to listen to the story.
‘Had we but known …’ said Helge, with a heavy sigh, winking at you. ‘So much of indigestion …’
No, they had no idea what had happened to Palfrey. Maybe he had become like Tarzan of the Apes, and remained in the forest.
