a rockery.
The trees inside are a laburnum and an elder. The laburnum slopes in such a way that I can swarm up it and on to the top of a brick wall to hide among the foliage of the second tree, the elder. He lies there, elegant and at ease, yet a threat to all baddies, until danger passes.
The tree just beyond the garden is much bigger, a full-grown elm. I find a way of climbing it. All things considered, it is wonderful. I have no fear of heights. Up I go. Elms become easier to climb the further one goes. I am able to gain almost the topmost, outermost twig, far above the ground.
This is a sort of paradise, to be above the world and its troubles, to be among the birds and rushing air. It’s easy to be up a tree. You hang on and make yourself comfortable. Everything below is transformed, amusing.
One thing cannot be escaped, even in the crown of an elm: one’s characteristics. I call cheerfully to one of the staff passing below, proud of my newly acquired skill. The staff takes fright and runs to tell my mother. She rushes from the flat, to stand under the tree in her apron and beg me to come down before I break my neck.
‘You don’t love me.’
‘Of course I do. Come down at once.’
‘Tell me you love me, then I’ll come down.’
‘I love you, you idiot, I love you. Come down or I shall fetch The Guv’ner.’
I climb down. I have discovered a secret weapon.
We still have a way to go to complete the tour of H. H.’s premises. Now we are far from the street, where a bonfire of discarded boxes burns almost continuously. It is confined within a low stone wall. My cousins and I dare each other to jump in. We wonder if this is the Mouth of Hell we hear so much about in church.
Next to the bonfire, the old coach houses, black-painted, now repositories for hay and straw, and the rat Utopia into which Bill and Gordon’s terriers are occasionally thrust. We are in the area of the stables, at the far end of the property. Here are cobblestones underfoot, to allow horse urine to drain peacefully away. Just opposite the coach houses stands the tack room, while further ahead are the stables where the horses are confined.
This region is presided over by one of the shop’s great characters. His name is Nelson Monument. Monuments still live in East Dereham. Nelson is the stable man from the late twenties onward. On ceremonial occasions, he wears a top hat and tails. Most of the time he is in cords, leggings and a big rough coat. His hasty temper is legendary. He has earned himself the nickname of Rearo. For this reason he, and particularly his shiny top hat, have become targets for the wit of Betts & Co. Rearo cannot enter the outfitter’s premises without catching one of those notorious knotted dusters on the nut. His furious response, as he looks about for the culprit, is always greatly enjoyed.
‘Oh dear, did something hit you, Mr Monument?’ Betts enquires.
Rearo retreats in dudgeon to his little tack room, sweet with the stench of horses. There a little fire burns, except in high summer, to dry out the harness.
The tack room stands next to the tool shed where Dot once cooked sheep’s heads. You can climb on to the roof of the shed and from there leap on to the tack-room roof. If by chance you have with you a sack soaked in water, you can lay it over the top of the chimney.
In a minute, reliably, Rearo will be smoked out of his den, and rush furiously into the yard to see what blighter done it.
There is no one in sight.
Outside the tack room stands a large metal water bin, wheeled. Occasionally it contains not water but bran. In the bran lies a chunk of rotten meat. The whole bin crawls with maggots, swarming from the meat. The stink is bad, the sight curiously fascinating. We do not, in those early years, entirely grasp the connection with human mortality. These maggots, full of blind life, are destined to be impaled on hooks and drowned in one of the Norfolk Broads during Bill’s and Gordon’s fishing expeditions.
Mortality is one of the mainstays of the stable area. The great black horses in their wooden stalls, where they stomp and kick restlessly, and look down with disdain on visiting boys, are funeral horses. All they see of the outside world is the road to East Dereham cemetery and back. Their destiny is to pull a glass-sided hearse.
On such occasions, the horses wear black plumes, and are preceded by my uncle Gordon, transformed into a comic figure of piety, dressed to look as black as the mares, complete with top hat instead of plume on head.
Like a Communist state a parvo, H. H. Aldiss will look after you from cradle to grave.
By the rear gates, we come on one last place to explore. A narrow exterior flight of stairs leads up into the top floor of the Factory. Here is a series of small wooden rooms in which the tailors live. Some sit cross-legged on a low bench. They mark their suitings with soapy triangular pieces of chalk.
These men are miserable. One is crippled. They do not wish to talk. They work long hours in poor light. It is too late to speculate upon their home life.
Everything in H.H.’s domain connects with something else. There is an escape route from the tailors into the Factory proper. The Factory is the major storehouse for all manner of items. A whole floor is given over to rolls of linoleum. They stand solemnly together in a leafless lifeless forest. The carpeting forest is more amenable. On the ground floor is a coconut matting forest, a very hairy forest, inhospitable to juvenile life. Yet in the middle of it is a secret nook, a hidey-hole among the prickly orange trunks. Here I take Margaret Trout, whose father shaves H. H.’s cheeks every morning. When we are snugly concealed, I kiss her.
She sits tight. I propose marriage to her. She agrees. The union is sealed with a toffee. Much mockery from Dot and Bill when they hear about it (from someone else, not from me; even at that early age, I know how to keep my affairs to myself). But that event is on the other side of the great Five Year Abyss. The engagement is broken off when I witness Margaret Trout being violently sick at school, just outside the front door, by the holly tree.
Another picture from this time. It illustrates a serial story in the children’s department of our daily newspaper The picture shows a small boy sitting by the hut where he lives. The sun shines brightly. He forms the shadow of his two hands into the silhouette of a duck. Unfortunately, the duck flies away. Thus, the boy loses his shadow. Losing one’s shadow is like the loss of one’s reflection, as happens in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and elsewhere. It is equated with losing one’s soul.
The boy travels the world in search of his shadow, to find it eventually in China.
The picture holds a grand mystery for me. I colour it, and wish to go to China myself. From then on, China becomes a permanent flavour in the stews of my interior thought. Impossible though it would have seemed to Bill and Dot, their son will in time mingle with Chinese people, and will go to China. He will wonder if that story was the first step along the way.
Now we have come to the end of our tour of The Guv’ner’s domains, except for the furnishing shop. The furnishing shop has staff doors opening on to the central yard, though its customers’ arcade and entrance is on the High Street. This is Gordon’s province and boys are unwelcome here.
We say nothing of what goes on underground. Two stokeholds feed the central heating of the various parts of the shops. Ferocious men shovel coal into boilers. Here, too, boys are unwelcome, in case they catch fire.
This great various place, the property of my grandfather, H. H. Aldiss, is where I passed my first five years of life, imbibing all its joys and terrors. It remains vivid to me, a complete little bubble of existence. To be exiled from it was to experience a burden of inexpressible loss. Of that loss I could speak to no one.
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