the game of Cows and Milkmaids is stopped. The interest remains. We were only exercising a natural curiosity in each other’s bodies. It’s a curiosity that lasts throughout life, and powers much of our art.
When I graduate to Miss Mason’s upstairs room – but this episode is on the far side of the Five Year Abyss – a gorgeous girl called Rosemary locks the door, tears off all her clothes, and dances naked upon the central table. We stand there enthralled, gazing upward. Rosemary is celebrating the attainment of puberty. Dark hair curls on her body, a special little wilderness among the barren slopes of her thighs. For days we beg her to do it again, but there is only that one performance. Perhaps someone else was fool enough to confide in their parents.
Every morning, as I set off for school, Dot comes to the flat door with me to see me on my way. This is what she says:
‘I may not be here when you come back.’
Perhaps she feels that this phraseology is insufficiently precise. Then she will say something even more dreadful as she gives a final tug to straighten my cap. The words are for my ears only; no one else hears what she says. What she tells me is the most dreadful thing anyone has ever said, though perhaps I will become accustomed to it when it is repeated.
‘I may be dead when you come back.’
After school, I drag my heels down Quebec Road, linger in the market place, in two minds about going home, about ringing the bell, about seeing if anyone answers. The steel-engraving angel is heavy at my shoulder.
I call the premises of H. H. Aldiss a paradise. So I was to think of it for many and many a year when we were exiled from it. But there is no earthly paradise; the Revd Edna Rowlingson was right there. Moments of beatitude certainly, but no long continuance.
If Bill is unwell, Dot also has her suffering, and much of this she passes on to her son. Something weighs upon her spirit. Winter depresses her, first spring flowers – the snowdrops, modestly hanging heads – elate her. She sighs and repeats that she wishes she were as free as a bird.
Worse, she would pretend to weep if I did something wrong. Why could I not be more like that dear dead little sister of mine?
What are little boys made of?
Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—
That’s what little boys are made of
Her weeping, hand shading eyes so that face could not be seen, is a convincing performance. Only when Betty comes along is there someone robustly to reject this pantomime, this hypocrisy.
Worse still, Dot has a way of governing me. She has a threat far worse than Bill’s thrashings. When I misbehave, she delivers the threat.
‘I shan’t love you any more if you do that.’
This poison, too, she must have felt, lacked some precision. She developed a variant which I found more lethal.
‘If you do that again, I shall run away and leave you.’
I have lapsed into a past tense. The film of childhood is breaking down. Time is on its destructive course.
When these threats are issued, I am made ill. I am a robust and jolly little boy, rarely sick. However, I have what Dot calls ‘bilious attacks’. Dr Duygan is summoned, with his old black bag. He can find nothing physically wrong. The attacks are a mystery, to me as much as anyone else.
The attacks earn me a groat of gratitude: I am always sick into the lavatory bowl. Not a drop is spilt elsewhere. It shows commendable control.
Decades later, as a grown man, I face a similar crisis, and yield up a similar response. So I perceive the true nature of those puzzling childish attacks. They are a nervous response to Dot’s threats; attempts to spew out the poisons she pours into my mind. They are not ‘bilious attacks’. They are violent physical responses to emotional attacks.
My agony of mind is great. I resolve that if things become too bad, I will go down to the shop and tell Bill. He will make Dot stop. He will understand I cannot help being bad. But I never put it to the test.
I take to running from the house. I hide in the shop. I climb trees. I trot about Dereham streets. After dark one evening, I am run over by a bike. The man dismounts and calls anxiously. But I rush limping away, hiding in an alley until I’m better. I go home with dirty clothes. Dot is plaintive when she sees the mud.
This time she really will leave me if I continue to be naughty.
She adds details. She will run away up Norwich Street and never come back.
I go into the lavatory and throw up. Yet another ‘bilious attack’.
It is convenient that I now go to school. It gives Dot more time alone. Bill works downstairs in the shop, coughing his dry cough.
Dot takes it easy upstairs. She is pregnant.
I have no knowledge of this aspect of the universe, which later will interest me greatly. I do not realise that Dot is growing larger. I can summon no recollection of her sorrows and sufferings during those months.
What remains in mind is that I am induced to kneel by her side and pray with her every evening.
Dear God, you know how I suffer. This time, this time, please let it be a girl.
I kneel by her side, hands clasped together, eyes tight closed, less than the dust. I know I am her mistake.
1931 dawns. I am still taking the Rainbow and following the exploits of Mrs Bruin’s Boys, but my mental horizons are widening. Dot likes to be driven by one of the staff to Norwich. She takes me with her for company, so that she can keep an eye on me. She likes to lunch in a restaurant overlooking the market square.
She cheers up over a good meal and tells me stories of her childhood, which are many. Dot is also a good overhearer. She eavesdrops on other tables and can hear the most intimate confessions even while yielding up her own.
On one occasion, a little downtrodden woman is eating alone at the table next to us. The waiter in his white tie serves her condescendingly. She is timid. She orders chicken. When she has finished, the waiter returns and enquires if she will have any sweet.
‘Oh, no, thanks,’ she says. She pauses, then confides in a rush, ‘Yes, I’ll have the rice pudding. You see, I’m out for the day.’
The waiter retreats. And a new catch phrase is added to the Aldissian repertoire. ‘You see, I’m out for the day.’ It serves for many occasions.
The poor woman was evidently a domestic on a rare day off. Dot always finds this saying immensely funny and (I hope) immensely touching.
After lunch we may shop in Norwich shops. More to my liking, we may go to the cinema. Was it called the Haymarket or the Maddermarket? In any case, it had about ten years to go before the Luftwaffe blasted it out of existence.
In that cinema we see George Arliss as Disraeli. There is also Erich von Stroheim in The Great Gabbo. Very intriguing. The ventriloquist is taken over by his dummy. We see films featuring Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, with Gordon Harker. I like Harker. He is hard-faced, and it rains a lot in his films, not always very realistically.
A horror film is showing. All the men wear evening dress. A husband is regularly away in the evening. His wife, who is very slender, determines to find out where he goes. She dresses in evening dress, disguising herself as a man. She enters her husband’s club. To maintain her deception, she is forced to accept a cigar, which makes her almost faint.
She attends the club theatre. A magician comes on and asks for a volunteer. The woman’s husband goes up on to the stage. He is changed. He sprouts a terrifying lion’s head, all mane and teeth.
This film, name completely gone, ranks for many years as one of the best films I have ever seen. I am a bag of nerves for weeks afterwards.
When we leave Cowper church on Sunday mornings, we are never allowed to look at the