One day, Bill gets up to riddle yesterday’s cinders and lay a fire in the grate, when he discovers the canary supine at the bottom of the cage, claws in the air. Alarmed, he takes it out and administers brandy to it on the tip of one of its feathers. The bird makes a full recovery, and continues to chirrup its song for many a year.
Bill, incidentally, is an expert on birds and birdsong. I stand with him, mute, on the edge of a great field. He waits under a tree, gun at the ready, for something for the pot, a rabbit or a pheasant. He wears plus fours and a cap at a rakish angle. I wear a tammy and rubber boots. A strange creaking note is heard distantly.
‘That’s a corncrake,’ he tells me. It seems a curious name for a bird. Nowadays, I fancy, modern methods of farming mean that the song of the corncrake is no longer heard over Norfolk farmland.
The fair comes to East Dereham with the ripe apples of harvest time.
While we in the Congregational church are lustily singing that ‘All be safely gathered in, Ere the winter storms begin’, the fair people are gathering in on the outskirts of town, waiting to invade. Tony and I mingle with the gypsies, their dogs and horses – and probably Alfred Munnings RA. The large caravans, the big rides, the big roundabouts are pulled by traction engines. The engines whistle and scream as the lofty monarchs are stoked into life.
Here the film is unreliable. Clever editing suggests that every year I run in to town beside the turning wheels of one of these machines, along with other urchins. I do so at least once. The hint of perpetuity remains, so great is the delight.
The ground shakes as our traction engine rolls towards the market place. A savage man with a red kerchief round his throat shovels in coal, standing high above us, a god with a black face. The great painted wheels turn, the twisted brass barley-sugar sticks that support the roof gleam, the furnace looks like the entrance to hell, while the smoke tastes like a whiff of paradise. We run yelling beside it, drinking in its power, all the way to the market square.
At the far end of the square, the Dodgems rink goes up rapidly. Once, with my friend Buckie, I discover a half-crown in a car recently vacated. We rejoice in our luck.
A visual treat is erected at the H. H. Aldiss end of the market place. The big roundabout is built round the traction engine that powers it. Under the striped canvas roof, a parade of monstrous bright animals, cockerels, tigers, spirited white horses and dragons, dances round and round, up and down, barely restrained from breaking out into the crowd and freedom.
How the staff of H. H love the fair! During their lunch hour, their one brief taste of liberty during the day, the young ladies of the drapery department, like a flock of blackbirds in their dark dresses, fly towards the attractions, sweeping me up with them as they go.
There’s my flirtatious millinery lady, all tease and flame! She shows her legs as we climb aboard the roundabout. Already the music starts, the platform begins to glide! I am lifted high by her, by her giggling friends, up, up on to the most Chinese of dragons. It seats three people. It begins to move. Up, down, up, down. The young ladies clutch me. I smell their perfumes. We all shriek. The music plays. The day shines and blurs.
Ah, the music of the big roundabout! The wheezing lungs of the boiler blow breath through unfolding punched paper, creating a din as powerful as the music. They play ‘Destiny’, ‘The Sun Has Got Its Hat On’, ‘You Can’t Stop Me from Dreaming’, ‘The Skater’s Waltz’, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and many more tunes.
At night I am put to bed. Dot kisses me goodnight. The fair is still going. It’s getting rough, now that dusk closes in. Drunks are about. Who knows what’s happening as crowds are drawn to the excitement from distant Toftwood, Shipdham and Swanton Morley – chaps with girls and whatever they do together. As I fade away into sleep I hear its music in the distance: ‘You Are My Lucky Star’, interpreted through that randy, wheezing music.
When I am older, I have a small sister to take to the fair. She loves it as much as I do.
The fair people come into the Aldiss shop, often dragging their curs with them at the end of a piece of rope. The men buy new suits, spending generously in heaps of small coin. By the time the fair is over, its stalls folded away, its glitter packed and gone, the rubbish and droppings swept from the market square and Church Street, the town is fairly hopping with fleas.
Dot stands my sister and me in the bath. She pulls off our clothes. She searches every inch of us for fleas and squashes them with a thumbnail, one by one.
My father told me … that mine was the middle State, or what might be called the upper Station of Low Life, which he had found by long Experience was the best State in the World, the most suited to human Happiness.
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
The film continues, in that eternal present of memory.
Dot at this period of her life is a moody person. She is in her early thirties when I am born. She has yet to recover from the death of her daughter in 1920, confronting her naughty son with the perfections of the dead girl, with the result that this phantom little person preys heavily on his state of mind. Studying an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – a copy of which no serious household was without – I see a picture of a man pestered by a small angel fluttering round his shoulders: there is absurdity and menace in it. From then on, the dead sister becomes ‘the steel-engraving angel’.
Dot has other problems. Bill’s health is one; his difficulties stem from the war.
He enlists in the Army on the outbreak of war in 1914, aged twenty-four. In May of 1916, he is transferred to the Royal Flying Corps (later to become the RAF). His number is 26047.
One period of the war he tells me about is the nightmare of a Channel crossing in a ship transporting mules to France, presumably to the British Expeditionary Force. A storm hits, the mules break loose below decks. Bill has to control them. I picture lamps swinging and blinking, hardly illuminating the dark fetid stables. Great black animals plunge in fright, showing the whites of their eyes. Amid the noise, the stamping hooves, Bill fights to keep the brutes steady.
Bill serves in Salonika. Later, he is gassed. He is sent to Egypt to recover. The dry air is considered good for his lungs. He is admitted to the 19th General Hospital in Alexandria, where he suffers from malaria. He flies with 113 Squadron in Mesopotamia.
Faded sepia photographs, kept in an old cardboard box, tell part of his story. Here he is in Luxor, among the ruins. Here he is by the Nile. Here he is in a topee, washing his socks. In most of these photographs he is perky and cheerful, as I first remember Bill – and puffing away at cigarettes. A photograph survives of him standing by an old Sopwith Something, leather flying helmet and goggles on his head, the image of Biggles, smoking.
He is involved in the Dardanelles débâcle, Gallipoli. But I cannot put a timetable together. Eventually, at the end of April 1919, he is discharged from what has become the RAF.
When approached in 1990 for details of Bill’s military career, the Ministry of Defence is helpful, but can, after so many years, produce only two brief documents. One of these documents shows that Bill is mentioned in despatches and awarded a pension of eight shillings and sixpence for seventy weeks. Presumably this is a disability pension.
Some time during the Second World War, when we live over the shop in Bickington, I discover a key which fits an old desk.