Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's by Brian Aldiss

Author:Brian Aldiss [Aldiss, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007482139
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-04T21:00:00+00:00

12

White Hopes, Black Olives

In 1961, I went to live in a small terrace house in a street running between the Iffley and Cowley Roads. I bought it from a friend on the Oxford Mail, Anthony Harris. It had a room and a kitchen downstairs and a bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs.

At the rear of No. 24 was a small and private garden with a pool in which four goldfish drank deep of life. A tool shed stood on the lawn, covered in clematis montana. Behind the far wall was a secret, or at least secretive, passage, along which could be heard the slap-slap of sandals on flagstones.

Off to the right as one looked down the garden, as one often did in search of inspiration, was a church. Off to the left was a dormitory-house where a religious community, the Cowley Fathers, lived in conditions, so one hoped, of extreme sanctity. The secret passage connected house with church. And the sound of the fathers’ feet as they went to worship was like the sandalled approach of fame.

At the far end of the garden I placed a galvanised iron washtub on its side, with a tin can standing in front of it. I used to shoot at the tin can from the kitchen door with an air pistol. This target practice was my exercise, together with the thrice-weekly walks up the High to the Oxford Mail and back.

I did a lot of work in that friendly little house, and got myself out of debt.

At the same time, another new personality was being born, to flourish in the exuberant atmosphere of the sixties.

Days were monastic in No. 24, evenings gregarious. With C. S. Lewis, I was an initiating member of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group, the leading lights of which often visited me. One of them, Chris Miller, virtually lived in for a while.

During the day, I enjoyed my solitude, existing on a diet of coffee and Melton Mowbray pork pies. I played a lot of music – often Ravi Shankar, who was big then. Ravi Shankar went with the sandals. A decade earlier, when I had felt myself imprisoned, when I was a wage-slave, I had played Borodin, to remind myself I had Byronic depths, or at least Byronic shallows.

Deep into the night at No. 24, when I could not sleep, I listened on my Bush to Radio Free Europe, which originated from Frankfurt. One programme in particular I enjoyed because it began with echoing footsteps and an announcer saying, ‘… quiet listening, and the lonesome sounds of a city after midnight …’ Being awake at three in the morning is the next best thing to getting stuck in the middle of the Gobi when one’s faithful dromedary has broken down.

Airs of Earth was a collection of stories appearing in 1963, rather remote in its concerns when one considers that, in England, this was the year of the Profumo affair, the Stephen Ward Case as it was then known, a scandal that brought down the Macmillan government.

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