The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Hand-Reared Boy

I was once travelling on a London bus. The young woman sitting opposite me was reading a book. It took me some time to realise it was my novel she had in her dainty hands!

Such occurrences are rare – rare and startling. You are never sure that real people will read your books. On another occasion, I was travelling with my children on a ferry to Gothenburg in Sweden. The boys discovered there was a chap with his girlfriend sitting on the upper deck reading
Hothouse
. The girl kept talking to him, breaking his concentration. My sons were genuinely cross with her!

This girl on the bus was about to get off the bus. I followed her and tried to strike up what one might call an acquaintance. She would have nothing to do with it. All the same, I realised the connection between real people, the real world, and the books I wrote.

… Later, I met a young woman who preferred masturbation to actual intercourse.

Although I have received many abusive – if not self-abusive – letters from readers, I felt and still feel I had hit upon a popular and real hobby in
The Hand-Reared Boy
.

Recently an American reader remarked that ‘If God had not wanted us to masturbate, he would have given us shorter arms.'

‘Extremely funny, genuinely erotic.' was the verdict of the TLS to
The Hand-Reared Boy
. With that, I tended to rest my case.

The protagonist is key, and the name Horatio Stubbs held resonance for me. Was it quintessentially English? Horatio, fine – as in Horatio Nelson. As for Stubbs, Professor Stubbs was the editor of many old English charters, while one of the painters I most admired was George Stubbs, the 18th-century artist with a preference for painting horses.

Who could be more English than that?

Brian Aldiss,

Oxford 2012

O
N
the one occasion that Sister Traven came to tea with us we were all in confusion beforehand, and my mother was the organizer of the confusion.

She darted here and flounced there, using what she called The Light Touch to bring me or Beatrice to heel – that is, saying in a Tone of Charm something more acceptable delivered in an ordinary voice. ‘No, Beatrice, dear, I think we
won't
have our ordinary serviettes,
if
you don't mind. Let's have some of the special ones, shall we, the paper ones, out of the bottom drawer of the sideboard. Or I'll get them, shall I? I'd
better
get them!'

Beatrice was not ruffled. She had been our maid for several years and was used to Mother's ways. She was now married and no longer ‘living in', but she still came in the mornings, when an older married sister looked after her increasing number of children. Today she was obliging and coming in the afternoon also, as she did on these special occasions. Among the alarms of setting the tea table I watched her with interest. A rather ordinary girl – not bad!

How faithful I am, I thought. Here I'm seventeen and she's got two awful brats and must be at least twenty-five, and I still fancy her a bit!

‘Darling, have your found your tie? You'd better hurry up, or she'll be here, won't she?'

‘Do you think she'll mind if I haven't got my tie on, Mum, really?'

She surveyed me, smiling hard. ‘She must have seen lots of little boys without ties, and without more than that, Horatio! But, after all, she is
your
guest, and I think you might try and help me just a little.'

The ‘little boy' grated as much as she must have known it would.

‘You wanted her round here, Mum – I didn't!'

‘Sweetie, try not to be too aggravating just at this moment when I'm trying to help you and Beatrice and Ann. You know we've asked her for
your
sake. She's
your
friend, isn't she? And perhaps one day she'll ask us up to Traven House to have tea with her, and her family.'

As I sneaked upstairs to look for my tie, I passed my sister going down.

‘That's all she thinks about – that Sister Traven will ask us all out to her place to tea.'

‘I'm not going. I can't find my dratted shoes,' Ann said. She was then thirteen, one of the classic shoe-losing ages.

Even when I was in my bedroom I could hear her shouting at Mother. She was far more vociferous than I.

When I was dressed, tie and all, I sat on the edge of my bed, tentatively reading a magazine. Thus Mother found me when she came upstairs.

‘Ready, darling? Well, why don't you go downstairs and be prepared for your guest? Wouldn't that be nicest? I'm going to do my hair again – I must look like nothing on earth! I feel absolutely exhausted before she's even arrived. I do hope she isn't too fussy! I wish Daddy'd been able to fix the blackout properly in that room.'

‘You look fine, Mum.'

‘Thank you, darling.' She came nearer to me and hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘You're a good boy, darling, a very good boy. Don't be in too much of a hurry to grow up, will you? Let me just put your tie a bit straighter. So glad you found it. I wish I'd borrowed Auntie Nell's tea service.'

‘Why? Is ours broken?'

‘You know how cracked and chipped it is.' She stepped back and surveyed my tie critically. ‘Your collars never look right. I bet they have really lovely tea services at Traven House, don't you? You did say her father was an admiral, didn't you?'

‘Rear-admiral.'

‘Good. Now you go downstairs, darling, and I'll just tidy my hair and be down in a minute. And, Horatio …'

‘Yes, Mummy?'

‘Do try not to talk too Leicestershire!'

‘I'll try, Mummy.'

‘Watch those long “u”s then.'

Rolling the magazine and cramming one end into my pocket, I went downstairs and glumly joined my sister. We sat one either end of the sofa. She did not blame me for our present constraints, for which I was grateful. She was playing chess with herself, as Father had taught her.

Like me, Ann was munching a cachou. Mother ladled them out to us on such nerve-racking occasions as the present, when we were about to be presented to someone of importance. Perhaps they effectively heightened our charms, though I have no recollection that our breaths needed sweetening.

On these occasions Mother always took a cachou herself, as she distributed them out of a tiny cardboard box. I loved their meretricious perfumed taste, even if they were associated with nerves and straightened ties.

My mother was a tall thin woman, several inches taller than my portly father. He was ponderous where she was bird-like. His reputation (somewhat unearned) was for never giving way to excitement; she (more justly) was known to be nervous. Our doctor had recommended fresh air as a restorative for my mother's nerves and at this period of my life she was always out walking in the streets or the nearby countryside, sometimes with Ann and, less often, with me and Father lagging somewhere behind.

‘You're too slow to catch a funeral!' she would call back. Father, with an elaborate display of dumb humour, would stare about, searching highway and hedgerow for sight of the hearse.

The guest whose appearance we were now so anxiously awaiting behind our perfumed defences was the nursing sister of my school, Miss Virginia Traven. I say ‘my school', but by this date I had determined that school was over and done with as far as I was concerned.

Several reasons existed for this determination, chief among them that I was finding my manhood, and that this was a good time to find it. The time was mid-September 1939, when Great Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for something under a fortnight. My older brother, Nelson, had already disappeared into the Army, and was – according to the one letter we had received from him – messing about in a barracks in Aldershot. Beatrice's husband, a husky young man who cleaned our car once a week, was reported to be training with the infantry somewhere on Salisbury Plain. My father was going through agonies of indecision about whether he should volunteer or not, and what the bank would say if he did. And I was sitting there on the sofa, picking calluses formed on my hands by the shovelling of great piles of soil on top of our air-raid shelter in the garden.