The Twinkling of an Eye. Brian Aldiss

before slipping a cachou into her mouth. Snowfire has already been applied to her chapped hands – the Snowfire pot bearing a brave image of a brazier of coals flaming away in the midst of an icy waste. She turns to her son and crams his arms into a small red mackintosh. We go downstairs. Taking up an umbrella from the stand in the porch, she leads the way to the market square.

      Other people hurry in the same direction. All wear hats, the men with caps or soft felt hats or even bowlers, the women with various confections, some from H. H.’s millinery, their offspring perhaps in berets or ‘tammies’. Since I am only a little tacker, I also wear a tammy.

      A considerable crowd has already gathered in the square. Uniforms, medals and banners are among them. People stand, solemn-faced, saying little. They are roofed by black umbrellas which make soft drumming noises as the rain falls on them. Everyone waits.

      A silver band plays. Solemn marches and hymn tunes are the order of the day. At eleven o’clock, maroons sound.

      Everything stops. Time itself dare not utter a word.

      The men remove their hats or, if they forget to do so, have their hats knocked off. Heads are bowed. Traffic halts. In H. H.’s shop, customers and staff will remain in suspended animation for the Two Minutes Silence. All over England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, silence prevails. A silence of mourning and thanksgiving.

      The maroons sound again. Once more, normal lay life resumes. Hats go back on heads. The inhabitants of East Dereham close their umbrellas, shake them, and return to work.

      ‘Mummy, what are you supposed to be thinking in the Silence?’

      ‘You can thank God that your father survived the War.’

      But if he had been killed, I begin to think, then I …

      The church in Dereham is dedicated to St Nicholas. In the middle of the nineteenth century, its benevolent vicar was Benjamin Armstrong, extracts from whose diaries have been published. But of greater interest to the world of letters is the smaller church in the market square, squeezed between two shops. It is as ugly as if built by Thomas Hardy in his architectural phase. Its ugliness proclaims that no beauty has meaning, except the beauty of God (see inside). One cannot think that any Eastern religion would embody in stone such an absurd thought.

      This is our church. It commemorates the poet William Cowper, who died in East Dereham in the year 1800. We are Congregationalists. If the documentary film is left running, it will catch us every Sunday entering this place of worship, Bill, Dot and Brian, in their Sunday best. We are greeted by our vicar, a small lively woman, Edna V. Rowlingson.

      Our pew is at the rear of the church, on the left as you go in. The Guv’ner will be here. Also, in the pew just in front, Gordon’s family, his sharp-nosed wife, Dorothy (née Childs), and their three children, Joyce, Derek and Tony. Not Gordon. Gordon is the organist. The Guv’ner will read the first lesson. Bill is ‘linesman’ with Mr Fox, and will move down one of the two aisles, taking the collection in a shallow wooden plate. The Aldisses really have religion buttoned up.

      The interior of the church is different from anything else I know at that time. Not comfortable, with the seedy brown-sugar comfort of the Exchange Cinema, rather echoing voids and dumb surfaces, the solidity of pillars either being or resembling marble. The pulpit, into which our little reverend climbs to preach to us, is of the stoniest stone.

      Miss Rowlingson is not shy. She speaks forthrightly, never forgetting she has children in her audience. All the same, we children are sinners like the rest of the congregation. Hell fire awaits us too. Oh, she’s convincing, with that terrible inarguable faith also resembling marble. For years and years to come, I shall wonder, Is it true? The first lie, the first wank, the first shag in Calcutta: Is it true about hell fire? Am I to suffer eternal damnation?

      To capture the attention of her congregation, the Revd Rowlingson leads into her terrible themes with the beginnings of an interesting story. She might open the sermon by saying, ‘Last week, I decided to go into the country. I was walking in the fields near Swanton Morley, when suddenly I saw I was in a meadow with a large bull. The bull began to approach me from the far side of the field at an increasing pace. Temptation is rather like that bull …’ We are back with damnation, which may gore us at any moment.

      A scarcely audible sigh of disappointment escapes the children in the congregation. There are three characters in this fragment of story, the person, the bull, and God. Of these three, God is the least interesting. We don’t know what the person and the bull may do, but God has made his position perfectly plain.

      The bull has more options than God. He can charge at Edna and toss her, he can charge and funk it at the last moment, or he can simply walk about looking slightly down in the mouth, in the manner of English bulls.

      It’s the person who has the most options. She or he can walk stealthily away in the direction of the gate; or they can run like billyo for the gate; or they can try jumping over the hedge; or they can stand their ground and address the bull courteously, as the man did with the lion in the fairy story, hoping the bull will turn away, unable to think of an answer; or they can quickly build a china shop in the field, whereupon the bull will pass into it.

      Pondering such questions, I find the sermon passing pleasantly. For those expert with the divining rod, here may be divined the seed of my science fictional habit. I have always preferred to write about people than about bulls and other alien creatures.

      Hymns with repetitive lines or meaningless words like ‘Hallelujah!’ are most boring. I like the ones with geographical reference. ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains/From India’s coral strand …’ Even better, ‘Before the hills in order stood/Or Earth received her frame …’ What a vision that conjures up. I imagine the world as a jumbled mess, swept by enormous waves.

      At home, religious references are frequent, although often used sarcastically. If one sulks or asks for sympathy, Bill is always ready to intone, ‘The noble army of martyrs …’ On rising from bed, he greets rainy days with ‘Hail, smiling morn!’ Dot enjoys a misquote: ‘Just as I am, without one flea’. (We are rural; fleas are not unknown.)

      The church has its claims upon us. One claim is particularly life-threatening. Visiting pastors come to stay with us over the weekends; we are so conveniently near the Cowper Memorial Church; or perhaps Bill is low man on the Aldiss totem pole. They visit; we house them.

      The visits of pastors need much preparation. Dot and Diddy, our favourite maid, are in the kitchen by Thursday, wondering what they should cook for the weekend. How fussy is he? They work on the assumption he will be pretty fussy, and are often right. By Saturday morning, Dot makes a house search. As a religious family, we are forbidden packs of cards, ‘The Devil’s picture book’, and all that. But there are incriminating signs of our lack of genuine holiness which must be concealed.

      The Radio Times, the paper containing lists of the week’s wireless programmes, is contained in a sort of stiff fabric jacket, on which Dot has embroidered marigolds. It must go. Far too worldly. My toys must be hidden away. Only Noah’s Ark, my beautiful shining Noah’s Ark, may remain, in view of its exonerating connection with the Old Testament.

      What gets hidden under the sofa cushions is the Passing Show, a weekly family magazine. The contents might include a new way to cook a cake, how to make a perfect dovetail joint, an article on a celebrity such as Gordon Richards, the jockey, or Sir Malcolm Campbell, the world’s land speed record holder, readers’ letters, a short story, a cartoon strip and a serial. The serials include two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus stories.

      These serials are illustrated by an artist called Fortunino Matania, whose individual style tends towards the female breast. For all I know, his real name is Joe Smith. The Italian name licenses him to give vent to tits at a time when they are still suppressed.

      It is tits the visiting pastors cannot abide. So Passing Show goes under the sofa cushions.

      Sometimes the pastors prove to have more whimsy than Wesley in them. Come Saturday evening, they have settled in, and sit companionably round