Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s - Brian Aldiss

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Bill had been captured by the Italians – a fate given to few, I imagine. He spoke a little Italian, and so had been made interpreter, in which role he was allowed some freedom in the camp, between prisoners and captors.

      Thus he was able to get his hands on the supplies of tea which the International Red Cross sent British prisoners. Because of a severe tea shortage among Mussolini’s heroes, the commodity was highly prized and could be exchanged for Italian cigarettes. The British POWs, despite their fondness for tea, did not drink it, preferring to trade. Bill, with access to the stores, found a solution to the dilemma.

      He would take the boxes of tea one at a time to his fellows. They would have a brew-up, dry the tea leaves afterwards and pack the used leaves back in the boxes, which Bill would then return to their proper place in the store. After which they were traded for cigarettes. Everyone was happy.

      One day, the Italians got a jump ahead. The British were forced to trade virgin tea for the cigarettes. Next day, the Italian camp commandant had his prisoners on parade and asked them sternly who had been messing about and ruining the new tea ration.

      Good work, Bill.

      Sunday tea with Mrs Y was pretty eccentric. Her name was Mrs Yashimoto. As far as I can piece together the story, she had gone out to Japan as a young missionary. There she met and fell in love with Mr Yashimoto, and married him. A rash and romantic thing to do – just before the USA and Britain declared war on Japan.

      For the crime of marrying a foreign woman, Mr Yashimoto was interned. His wife somehow managed to escape and returned to England. She led a devout Christian life, pining all the while for her husband. Many looked down on her, since the Japanese – long before they started to shower little electronic goodies upon us – were hated at the time.

      Eventually Mrs Y got her husband back. To the delight and benefit of them both.

      By then I was preparing to leave Sanders.

      I had asked Sanders several times for a rise in pay. He refused. What he dangled instead was the possibility of a partnership in the business when he retired, which, I was given to understand, might be any day.

      Then he said to me, taking me aside, ‘You come up and see me on a Friday evening, and I’ll slip you an extra pound. You’re worth it. Just don’t tell anyone else.’

      ‘No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t accept it on those terms.’

      This annoyed him. After work that evening, I took Bill to the nearby Blue Boar Inn. Over a pint, I told him my tale. Bill was completely unmoved. ‘Yes, Frank made me the same offer. I turned it down on the same grounds you did.’

      ‘What about the partnership?’

      ‘That’s complete boloney. I’ve heard that tale too. Everyone hears it. The man is a hypocrite.’

      ‘Christ, worse than that, I’d say.’

      ‘I would prefer to categorise him as a hypocrite. The man has had a hard life.’

      After that, there seemed nothing for it but to leave.

      3

       Vienna Steak, Heinz Salad Cream

      Sanders liked his pint of blood. When he finally retired, he sold the shop, as it happened, to a friend of mine, Kyril Bonfiglioli. By then I had gone.

      Those first years in Oxford were a time of intense dark living. I had to come to terms with many incompatibilities. The shop with its desperately long hours was a prison, yet it was also a magic cave, an inspiration, jostling with the personalities of dead authors.

      Outside was freedom, of a kind. I was the underprivileged poor, living in a rented room, with little spare time and the crazed impulse to write. Behind everything was the East, which I was sickening for and trying to forget, knowing I should never be able to return there.

      The room in which I lodged was on the second floor of a house in King Edward Street owned by a Miss Pond, a learned and sickly lady who taught Spanish and Latin. Even the landladies were learned in Oxford.

      It was curious to realise that I knew nothing of England. I had taken part in World War II, one of the biggest initiation rites in history. Here I was at the age of twenty-three, trying to write, trying not to be a savage.

      In that dark shop, I missed the sun. Life in the East had mainly been spent outdoors, in the glorious light of the tropics. No wonder Non-Stop concerns people trapped for ever inside the confines of a spaceship going nowhere. This is the metaphorical way in which science fiction is truthful, and has less to do with science than the emotions.

      Involved in the bookshop, I became involved to some extent with the university, for which I had, at that time, great respect. Some of my friends were undergraduates, such as Jack Bentley, with whom I had worked in the signal office in Hong Kong. Jack spent a lot of his time in his rooms, reading Thorne Smith. He never took to Balliol.

      One of the pleasures on offer was the college play. Most of the colleges had active dramatic clubs; St John’s had the St John’s Mummers, and so forth. At the apex of the college clubs was OUDS, the university dramatic society.

      All the clubs performed old plays, particularly plays set for the English curriculum. Merton did Julius Caesar in modern dress, Nazi uniform. It was the first time I had heard of such creative parachronism.

      It was possible to see plays which are a fundamental part of English literature but rarely performed, such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Gammer Gurton’s Needle. I saw one Hamlet performed on the walls of New College, and another, with an actual Dane in the main role, performed in the Town Hall. At the time, I was possessed by Hamlet, imagining myself halfmad. Which I was.

      There were Restoration romps by Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh, the latter’s The Relapse being an especial delight. Of course there was plenty of Shakespeare and Marlowe, with a particularly memorable Edward II played in Oriel quad in freezing summer weather, with Neville Siggs as the King. Darkness fell as we sat watching the improvised stage.

      The black Jacobean plays of Webster and Tourneur particularly attracted me, with their sense of guilt, revenge motifs and flashes of poetry. Webster, of course, was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin, as T. S. Eliot noted. Both Webster and Tourneur remain mysterious figures, about whom little is known; yet their savage entertainments have survived over three and a half centuries. Only recently, we saw a striking new production of The Revenger’s Tragedy at Stratford. The Atheist’s Tragedy contains some fine poetry, though it is rarely performed.

      Undergraduate companies had limited resources. One courtier and a curtain were made to stand for the riches of a Renaissance court, while the bad barons of English history padded out their stature with common-room cushions and an extra pair of rugger socks.

      Ben Jonson’s marvellously funny Epicene, or the Silent Woman was played in Mansfield College gardens, produced by Frank Hauser, later director of the Meadow Players at the Oxford Playhouse. In the cast were such future celebrities as Robert Hardy, Norman Painting (who, after graduating, went into The Archers), Daphne Levens and John Schlesinger. Jonson’s plays, stodgy to read, come alive on the stage. Epicene was an OUDS production. The OU Experimental Theatre Club put on a stunning Troilus and Cressida, the cast including Russell Enoch (later the William Russell of TV’s Robin Hood fame), Michael Croft and Paul Vaughan – not forgetting a black-clad Ulysses, the future Chairman of British Rail, Peter Parker.

      This Troilus was performed in the grounds of Halifax House. The night I attended, Ken Tynan and Alan Brien were in the audience, the two great rivals in with who filled the middle pages of Isis magazine, Tynan on theatre on one side, Brien on films on the other.

      The Playhouse – closed in 1989 – boasted a good repertory company in my early days in Oxford. On Monday nights, seats were half-price. I remember in particular a terrific production of Sheridan’s funniest comedy, The

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