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We lay awake at nights, listening to Dornier engines, like an ischaemic event in the lower cerebellum, as Goering’s Luftwaffe flew overhead. The Dorniers came in squadrons, passing very slowly, throb-throb-throb … The distinctive noise rolled down our chimneys. Listening, you felt as an animal feels, hiding when hunters are near.

One night at midnight, Bill roused me from my bed and we walked up the village to climb Belmont Hill, from whence there was a good view of the surrounding country.

A glow lit the whole sky to the south.

‘Exeter’s getting it,’ Bill said.

Later, we drove to Exeter to witness the extent of the damage. Most of the city had gone. Rubble had been cleared away by then. Nothing remained. Nothing, except the cathedral, which stood alone on an unearthly flat plain. Here and there, as we drove, we passed an occasional lamp standard which remained upright. No living person was to be seen; those unburied had decamped to adjoining villages. The Germans had wiped the city off the map. In this surreal landscape, Air Marshal Hermann Goering had done Salvador Dali’s work.

The English, so tolerant, so enduring, so brave, during World War II, became a lesser race after the war. Exeter was rebuilt as an anonymous town, without that sense of style its old black-and-white buildings had conveyed. Little memory was retained of what it had once been. The Germans, Poles, French rebuilt their cities according to old plans and photographs, effecting smart restorations and canny improvements. British town planners held no such reverence for what had been, as they plugged the standard chain stores into the city centres. The English made no great protest at what was happening.

The blackout lent an enchantment to banal village streets. On more than one occasion, we climbed Belmont Hill to watch the Luftwaffe at their work of destruction.

Far distant, as if an angry planet were about to rise, a fan-shaped light would grow on the horizon. We stood silent on the hill to witness the raid on Plymouth. Even the burning of distant Swansea was visible. Hundreds of civilians died, and with them fabrics and traditions of an earlier age.

After witnessing the air raids we would walk back down the hill, and huddle in the little kitchen behind the shop while Dot made us cups of tea. By the time we were in bed, we would hear the Dorniers returning to Germany. Throb-throb-throb, down the chimney again.

On Belmont Hill stood a small public school, run by a regimental sergeant-major posing as headmaster. The dramatist John Osborne, four years my junior, was incarcerated there as a boy. He used frequently to come down to our shop to buy a packet of Player’s ‘Weights’, whereupon he became friendly with Dot. Growing sick of the sergeant-major, Osborne dotted him a punch in the eye, for which he was expelled.

One great advantage of the blackout was the darkness everywhere, allowing the stars and Milky Way to shine clearly. With my little Stars at a Glance in hand, I used to stand on top of our air-raid shelter and watch the constellations. How peaceful were those regions of fire – so different from Exeter burning. Surely in the marvellous beauty of the night sky lay some hope for humanity, war or no war.

Since then, I have stood in the Dandenong Hills in Australia and looked up at a different sky. All the familiar populations of the northern hemisphere have gone. It is as if one stood on a different planet. Even the night sky seen from Mars would appear less alien: the Plough, Cassiopeia, and other constellations would look much the same from Olympus Mons as seen from our air-raid shelter. The distance between Earth and Mars is so short, if insuperable as yet.

At West Buckland, things settled down. The headmaster, Sammy Howells, was a master of sarcasm. He wore pince-nez and had a ginger moustache. The lapels of his suit were permanently discoloured by a W. D. & H. O. Wills’ product, Gold Flake cigarettes. Ciggies must have served him as dummy and mistress, and fumigated the perpetual pong of small boys from his nostrils.

To give the devil his due, he ran a tight ship in stormy times. Sammy was a brilliant teacher of English and in particular of English grammar. With his withering tongue, practised at dissecting the language, he could take any unfortunate boy apart. I relished those lessons, much as I feared Sammy. He took a particular dislike to me, calling me ‘The Comedian’. Sammy liked to be the one making the jokes.

It was noticeable that when he picked on one boy in the class, everyone else laughed fawningly, protecting themselves from the line of fire. They also professed to like him, for the same reason. I really hated Sammy. The old bastard died just before my first book was published. The smokes got him in the end. His lungs went. Poor Sammy Howells – a good headmaster, a brilliant teacher, a dedicated man, a shit.

One thing stands for ever to Sammy Howells’ credit. Whenever Winston Churchill was due to address the nation, Sammy had us all assemble in the Memorial Hall to listen to his speech. Listen we did to that great master of oratory, during those testing years the inspiration of our country.

Obtaining masters to teach was a wartime problem. Most of them had been called up into the Forces. Sammy engaged two conscientious objectors. One was a mathematics teacher, a Mr Coupland, immediately nicknamed, with cruel perception, Chicken Coupland. Coupland knew much maths but could not convey it. Despite furious beatings, liberally dispersed, he could not make us learn. I regret it; I never entered the world of maths, on which most sciences depend.

Mr Foster was a strange man, a refugee from somewhere. We tended to make fun of him. He was known as Mitabout Foreskin, a Bowler christening. Then he took us for a German lesson, and sang ‘Roselein’ to us in a beautiful tenor voice. From then on we were much more respectful.

‘Crasher’ Fay taught us German and English in the upper forms. Most lessons were enjoyable. It was the boredom after class, the lack of privacy, the noise that got to you. All well exemplified in Lindsay Anderson’s film of public school life, If …

The truth was that the hardships of wartime Buckland, together with the rigours of the climate – over eighty inches of rain a year, compared with East Dereham’s twenty-eight – formed a common bond between masters and staff. Once a term, a barber and his assistant would drive out from Barnstaple on rationed petrol and cut the hair of every boy in the school, working steadily all day, class by class. We went in to the torture chamber maned like lions, to emerge as criminals, scarred here and there by the hasty razor. Of course we laughed, unaware that similar shavings were taking place in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Some masters, some boys could not stand the rugged conditions. A brief visitant among the masters was an eccentric S. P. B. Mais, then quite a famous name, a popular broadcaster and writer. I knew his name from the pages of Modern Boy, for which he wrote spy stories. He walked about the school complaining, swaddled in sweaters, swathed in scarves. He taught maths in English lessons, algebra in geography, and anything in anything else. I was to meet him later in life. He left Buckland after one or two terms to write a grouchy little book about the place – a book banned by Sammy but adored by Sammy’s prisoners.

Certainly the place was remarkably cold and wet. Spartan was its ethos. After lights out in our house dormitory, the blacked-out windows had to be opened, the ones to the north, the ones to the south. Mid-ocean gales blew through the rafters, wafting Atlantic chill with them. Plumbing was rudimentary. Each of us had an enamel bowl, filled overnight with cold water. Many a winter’s morning we broke the ice before we could wash. I’m convinced this hardship was good for us, at least for those who survived.

Then came summer. We did not at that time appreciate the beauty of North Devon. But there were long evenings spent out on the playing fields, rehearsing cricket strokes, feeling both the sound and the motion of bat striking ball; or simply playing catch with friends, the leather pill flying high in the air as the shadows of the trees along the drive lengthened. We could also swim in the school pool, but the rule of nudity was never to my taste, concerned as I was with privacy and secrecy.

Once my parents had enlisted me in Buckland, they never visited the school again, although it was only eleven miles from the shop. At the end of term I might cadge a lift in a van to Barnstaple or else walk with others three miles down the valley to Filleigh station, there to catch a Barnstaple train. (Filleigh station has long since been closed.) From Barnstaple, one caught a bus up Sticklepath Hill to Bickington, where it stopped almost opposite our shop.

On one occasion, I returned from school, went upstairs, flung myself on an ottoman, and lay there reading in peace. The relief after the racket of school was considerable. Dot came upstairs from the shop, annoyed because I was so unsociable. I used to stay awake at nights, reading into the small hours.

Having exhausted all the astronomy books in the school library, I turned more eagerly to science fiction magazines, which in those days regarded astronomy as the queen of the sciences. In the fifties they were to become propagandists for space travel. Curious to think that today much SF finds its place less among the stars than inside computers, in games and thought-sequences that recycle old ideas in new form. Not, in fact, outward but inward.

SF magazines introduced me to the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. I went to the Barnstaple Atheneum and applied for membership. The old men were curious to find a fifteen-year-old in their midst. Sitting in a large leather chair, I read Thus Spake Zarathustra. There I came across that conception of the Übermensch which was enjoying such popularity across the Channel in Berlin.

Nietzsche’s ideas filled me with indifference, even when I encountered them, diversified, diluted, in the writings of such SF authors as Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, whose books enjoyed wide popularity. I marked myself down as the eternal underdog. This canine trail led upwards later, from underdog to Steppenwolf.

As for the Übermensch, they were part of the fantasies with which I, like many others, scared myself. To relieve the tedium of the bus ride from Bickington to Barnstaple, I would play the British spy travelling on a German bus. The innocent conductor, working his way along the aisle to sell us tickets, was the Gestapo Überleutnant, checking papers and passports. He would find me out. I would be captured and shot, and my body flung into the Rhine.

This drama so took hold of me that on one occasion I jumped from a moving bus as it crossed the Taw bridge, to go sprawling in the road. The conductor watched grinning from the back of his bus, but luckily did not fire at me.

At the Atheneum I became acquainted with the writings of a local Barnstaple author, W. N. P. Barbellion, author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man. The misanthropic Journal was more to my taste than Zarathustra. Barbellion is splendid on himself and on the War – even if in his case it was the Great War. He writes, ‘They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre hundred years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in AD 1915 – surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boche to play with – just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch?’

How could Barbellion foresee that within about twenty-five years after he wrote, the Boche were indeed intent on experimenting with the globe – and making a hell of it (aided and abetted by their allies the Japanese)? Did I but know it in AD 1942, they had already put the clock back by many centuries.

As for Barbellion on himself – to read him was to see myself in his sickly mirror.

‘I am so steeped in myself – in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshall and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know – if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with – but the rest of the diagnosis?

‘One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred.’

The adventures of Barbellion’s psyche led me to that epicentre of adolescent turbulence, The Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff. I came across the book in two tall volumes, translated by Mathilde Blind – a name in its way as exciting as Bashkirtseff. This Ukrainian-Russian girl died aged twenty-five, thus becoming even more romantic than Barbellion, who ran to thirty-one years. The tempestuous Marie loved herself, hated herself. Misery excited her: it was something to pour into her many diaries. And she discovered as others have done that she was really two people.

‘At present I am vexed, as if for another person.

‘Indeed, the woman who is writing, and her whom I describe, are really two persons. What are all her troubles to me? I tabulate, analyse, and copy the daily life of my person; but to me, to myself, all that is very indifferent. It is my pride, my self-love, my interests, my envelope, my eyes, which suffer, or weep, or rejoice; but I, myself, am there only to watch, to write, to relate, and to reason calmly about these great miseries, just as Gulliver must have looked at the Liliputians …’ (Paris, May 30th 1877.)

Copying out these sentences now, I recall that for a brief period I lusted for this amazing emotional girl, long dead. I heard her satin skirts sweeping the Second Empire carpets, her voice at the piano, I empathised with her intense longings, feeling we would be a perfect match for one another, a consummation and a disaster waiting to happen.

Of course I was ashamed of these feelings. In this callow, shallow period, I was ashamed of all feeling. Much like the divine Marie, I could not tell how distraught I was. When I did have a real girlfriend, I dared not by a flicker of the eye reveal as much to my parents, or even to Betty, who might have told Dot.

Impossible to admit that I had a sex life. They would have murdered me. Or, worse still, laughed at me.

In some ways, it became more comfortable to be at school – though there was always the dread of leaving home, of feeling that I was being kicked out. I never shed tears – except when I said goodbye privately to Tiny, who was growing old.

Ours became an excellent form as we moved steadily up the school. We laughed a lot. I endeavoured to read every book in the moderately well-equipped library. This was when I started on Freud and Gibbon and Eddington and anything to do with astronomy or the workings of the human mind. My mind was already giving me trouble. The novelists we much admired were Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Eric Linklater and J. B. Priestley. Graham Greene came along a little later.

Buckland was and is a sporting school. We played Chivenor, the nearby RAF station, at rugger, as well as various other public schools such as Blundells, outside Tiverton. All that strenuous exercise prepared us not only for the Army, but for life, to endure its hard knocks.

At the beginning of the autumn term, lorries arrived to collect the senior part of the school and drive us out to new agricultural developments on Exmoor, where heath had been turned into farm land. Acres and acres of potatoes were being grown. We worked from early in the morning until late, digging up long rows, turning up nests of those smooth vegetable eggs, while the sun sloped low towards the Atlantic.

It was backbreaking work. Our reward was to be driven home to school for mass baths, all grubby naked bodies steaming together, followed by a meal in hall of sausage with piles of mashed potatoes, our potatoes.

We also held drives for the Forces. At one time, a group of us, wearing clean rugger togs, pushed the school barrow around Swimbridge, collecting waste paper. We knocked on people’s doors. Sometimes they invited us in and plied us with cups of tea. Generously they gave, throwing out valuable books, sets of Edwards’ Birds, first editions of Anthony Trollope’s novels. But, ‘Us’ll keep us bound volumes of Punch, because them’s real valuable’.

What was really worthwhile went out with the rubbish. The mediocre was saved.

As in an inverted morality play.

3
The School

Suddenly, after a long silence, he began to talk … ‘A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.’

Carlos Castaneda

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

We held a ‘Wings for Victory’ fair on WBS rugger field, the Huxtable. It was a great event. Our vendettas against local farmers were set aside so that we could borrow their carts. I turned what had been shameful into satire against myself and became Adolf for a day.

Some years previously, one of the innumerable Framlingham bullies, a creature with the skin of a bullfrog and hyperthyroid eyes to match, grabbed me and declared that I resembled Adolf Hitler. Dragging me into his foul den, he pulled a lock of my hair down over my forehead and painted a moustache of black boot polish on my upper lip. I was then made to goose-step round a senior common room, giving the Sieg Heil for the delectation of all the other bullies – many of whom would doubtless have given their eyeteeth to dress up in Nazi uniforms, rape Slav women, and bugger each other while strangling Jews.

By Buckland’s ‘Wings for Victory’ day, I had sufficiently recovered from this degradation to put the act to good use. Suitably uniformed, I mounted one of the farm carts and addressed all and sundry in gibber-German, looking remarkably like Adolf. Or so my friends and admirers told me later.

Hitler still exerts an awful attraction. He has proved to be many things to many men. Hugh Trevor-Roper captured something of the truth when he described Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries.’

Well, that does sound fascinating …

It is terrible to think one should still hold Hitler in mind. And I once imitated him! Even the young and innocent are fascinated by wickedness. I suppose it helped prepare us at WBS to be soldiers.

To Crasher Fay I owe more than mere learning. For English classes, we had to produce an essay every Monday. I was excused. Crasher permitted me to present a story instead. A gratifying privilege as we trudged towards the School Certificate …

By this time, the writing of short stories had become a continuous occupation. Our form enjoyed, shared, quoted, laughed aloud at Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, as well as their less famous books, such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote ‘Invalids and Illnesses’. It was sanitary enough to take home, where my mother read it. I overheard her saying to someone, after reading out a funny bit about diphtheria, ‘You may not like it, but it is clever.’ Eavesdroppers seldom hear good about themselves; I felt she had summed me up.

Most of my stories were less sanitary. They were mainly planetary adventures, dirty SF, crime, or dirty crime. Screwing featured largely. I often wrote in the dormitory, under the bedclothes by torch-light. The stories always remained first draft. Penny-a-read was the nominal charge. Nobody paid, everyone read. It was gratifying. A superior fellow in the Sixth, a horn-rimmed Harrison, said, ‘Aldiss, these tales of yours are ridiculous and badly constructed.’

He was probably right. But I wrote compulsively, and risked beating and expulsion if they fell into the wrong hands.

I also wrote and illustrated a series of comic tales, ‘The Jest-So Stories’. At term’s end, Bowler and I put all the manuscripts in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin and buried it in a rabbit burrow in the Plantation, from where we retrieved it the following term.

I became prolific. At one of my more acceptable sardonic stories, presented as a Monday offering, Fay took offence. After reading parts of it aloud, he stared hard at me and said, ‘I warn you, Aldiss, if you go on like this you’ll become another Evelyn Waugh.’ Never had I heard such praise.

Bowler was a great character. He, Saxby, and I were jokers-in-chief. Don Smith was a more sophisticated type. He brought a wind-up gramophone and played jazz records. We heard for the first time Tommy Dorsey and Orchestra playing ‘Getting Sentimental Over You’, and, ah!, Jimmie Lunceford and his band playing ‘Blues in the Night’, with the Johnny Mercer lyrics:

From Natchez to Mobile

From Memphis to Saint Joe,

Wherever the four winds blow …

And wherever those cities were, there I wanted to be. I saw the movie Blues in the Night, which features Jimmy Lunceford, eighteen times over the years, in England and abroad. Almost as many times as Citizen Kane. As an adult, I sang the song in duet with the philosopher A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayers.

End of term. Back to that dreary Bickington shop on the corner. And now great excitement. Following Pearl Harbor, the United States of America had entered the war. On our side. What was more, an American regiment was to be flown over to Fremington.

Fremington was next to Bickington; one village straggled into the other along the main road. Under Dot’s guiding hand, the Bickington Women’s Institute decided to give the Americans a slap-up reception. Music and dancing would be the order of the day. There would be food and soft drinks. No alcohol, since we had heard the American forces drank – unlike, of course, our boys. Everything was made ready.

The American regiment arrived. It was black. In those days, the US segregated its soldiery by colour.

What a fluttering in the dovecotes! Committee meeting! A sensible decision was arrived at. Black Americans were in the war just like anyone else, and would soon have to fight in Europe. The slap-up reception must continue exactly as planned.

So black troops poured into Bickington, and the party went ahead. It was a roaring success. The music veered from the hot—

I’ll be round to meet you in a taxi, honey,

Better be ready ’bout a ha’ past eight—

to the sentimental—

I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine

The Bickington ladies, including Mrs McKechnie, were delighted with their own wisdom. The black Americans were charmed to find themselves in a country without any colour prejudice …

At school, we made a discovery. Mr H. G. Wells was still alive! It amazed and cheered us. We were accustomed to reading books by dead authors; the books we studied were by the illustrious dead, from Hillard & Botting onward. But the great imaginer was living in London, a city more devastated by German bombs than by his Martians.

I read and wrote. Most eagerly I read Astounding, in which, to my mind, the future was being born. Chicken Coupland caught me reading an issue in class. Seizing it, he tore it into small pieces, damning it for rubbish. I had been in the middle of a Theodore Sturgeon story.

My difficulties with Sammy continued. The one master on my side was my housemaster, Harold Boyer. Harold was of mixed English-German descent, and hence presumably not allowed to serve in HM Forces. He arrived at the school in 1940 and went on to become a governor of the school and an HM Inspector of Schools.

Harold could teach anything. His manner was somewhat theatrical. He would prowl before us, slapping one hand in the other. ‘Facts, facts, you must have facts.’ He was making reference to the School Certificate exams, which began to loom over us.

He became head of the house I was in, and showed a genuine interest in our lives. Like Crasher Fay, he rarely if ever beat people. He was a humorous man. After I had left school I discovered just what amusing company he was. Harold then revealed a bawdy subversive streak, whereas in the form room he could resemble a one-man version of the Holy Roman Empire.

Like the other masters, Harold shared Buckland’s general discomfort. Unmarried masters generally had rooms within the school. Harold, being married to Isabel, and having three daughters, lived in a cottage two miles away in Charles Bottom – always known as Charlie’s Arse. Sometimes we saw the dark-haired Isabel pushing a pushchair up to school; this sight caused some excitement among the sex-starved.

Finally, our form came to the test – School Cert., later to become GCE. Although my militaristic spirit was rather more pinko than khaki, I had passed Cert. A, the OTC exam, a necessity for becoming an army officer. I was less confident about School Certificate. At that precarious stage in life, one’s whole future appeared to depend on the wretched exam. And I had not always paid the greatest attention. Was I not ‘Foo’, the demon humorist of the Middle Fifth?! (‘Foo’ was a favourite expletive used in Bill Holman’s prize surrealist comic strip, ‘Smokey Stover’.)

Sammy did everything to make life difficult. On the morning of the first exam, tension was high. We were to proceed into the memorial hall to widely spaced desks. On the way, I dropped my inkwell. Ink splashed over the stone passage. This Sammy seized on in a fury. Here was a chance to humiliate the comedian!

I was made to go down to the kitchens, fetch a bucket of hot water, and swab up the mess. One of the menservants could easily have done the job. As a result I entered the hall late and flustered. When I made a return visit to the school after the war, I observed a faint blue stain still marking the site of my accident: the Aldiss Memorial Blob.

We went through the exams, playing tennis between times. A week in limbo, isolated from the rest of school and from the future. At the end of term my report reached home. Sammy wrote on the bottom of the report that I had behaved so badly I did not deserve to pass the exam.

It was a low blow. Bill was furious. Was this all I cared for all their sacrifices? He mentioned in passing how much money he had wasted on my education. As usual, I stood before him without defence. Not for the first time I wondered why, when I admired my father so, I was mute in his presence.

After the ticking off, he and Dot were hardly on speaking terms with me. I could not explain. Before the most patient interlocutor I could not have explained the difficulties of matching two conflicting sets of interests, education and growing up. Indeed, these difficulties remain hard to reconcile. You strive to become adult, which means rejecting the control of your elders; yet to become educated you must submit to their discipline.

‘Your father is really upset,’ was all Dot would say when I tried to approach her. ‘You didn’t work, did you?’ She too suffered from conflicting loyalties.

That was always her role in our little army: the NCO between the Commanding Officer and his tiny conscripts.

Bill and Dot were an incompatible pair. Whatever had occurred between them in the early stages of their marriage, during the wartime years and afterwards, they stood together. When things were most trying for them, at the Bickington store in particular they saw the necessity for solidarity, even at the expense of their children. However greatly they had once disappointed each other, they remained loyal and devoted. Over all, they set Betty and me a persuasive argument for marriage and its loyalties – an argument I later found myself unable to follow.

Under the shadow of Bill’s silent disapproval, my fragile morale evaporated. Only at school had there been friends to turn to. I slipped under the ever-threatening shadow of my own disapproval. I took to climbing apple trees and falling out of them, but received only bruises rather than the desired broken neck. Even there I seemed to lack determination.

Successes glittered occasionally amid the prevailing shades of failure. I persuaded Betty to scale the north face of the roof and enter the deserted bakery with me. We established a museum in our old disused stable, filling it with stones, fossils and sheeps’ skulls found in nearby fields.

It was during this period that Mussolini was arrested and killed. We were treated to newsreel footage of him hanging upside down, like a pig’s carcass. How dare I make anything of my sufferings when the great world was undergoing a kind of death agony, and millions were dispossessed or dying? Who am I to cry out? No great religion has ever proposed that life is a bed of roses.

Those summer holidays were a sickness. The days wasted away, one by one. Exam results were due to arrive by post on 5 September. The day of my complete humiliation drew nigh. On 3 September, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, I woke early, cowering in bed, listening for the sound of the postman. I was determined I could not face the parents at the breakfast table. In the end, I felt driven to go downstairs.