The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(40)

No one, not even he, would have imagined that the necessary components could come together in that revolting hovel to produce a writer, and yet they had—although the delivery had been a long-drawn-out, fraught one. It had taken him precisely twenty-one years and three months to turn his dreams into reality. According to his calculations, that is. As though he were addressing future biographers, Wells usually identified June 5, 1874, as the day his vocation was revealed to him in what was perhaps an unnecessarily brutal fashion. That day he suffered a spectacular accident, and this experience, the enormous significance of which would be revealed over time, also convinced him that it was the whims of fate and not our own wills which shaped our futures. Like someone unfolding an origami bird in order to find out how it is made, Wells was able to dissect his present life and discover the elements that had gone into making it up. In fact, tracing back the origins of each moment was a frequent pastime of his. This exercise in metaphysical classification was as comforting to him as reciting the twelve times table in order to steady the world with the mainstay of mathematics each time it seemed to him like a swirling mass. Thus, he had determined that the starting point, the fateful spark setting off the events that would turn him into a writer was something that might initially appear puzzling: his father’s talent for spin bowling on the cricket pitch. But pulling on that thread quickly unraveled the whole carpet: without his talent for spin bowling his father would not have been invited to join the county cricket team, had he not joined the county cricket team, he would not have spent the afternoons drinking with his teammates in the Bell, the pub near their house, had he not frittered away his afternoons in the Bell, neglecting the tiny china shop he ran with his wife on the ground floor of their dwelling, he would not have become acquainted with the pub landlord’s son, had he not forged those friendly ties with the strapping youth, when he and his sons bumped into him at the cricket match they were attending one afternoon, the lad would not have taken the liberty of picking young Bertie up by the arms and tossing him into the air, had he not tossed Bertie into the air he would not have slipped out of his hands, had he not slipped out of the lad’s hands the eight year-old Wells would not have fractured his tibia when he fell against one of the pegs holding down the beer tent, had he not fractured his tibia and been forced to spend the whole of the summer in bed, he would not have had the perfect excuse to devote himself to the only form of entertainment available to him in that situation— reading, a harmful activity, which under any other circumstances would have aroused the his parents” suspicions, which would have prevented him from discovering Dickens, Swift, or Washington Irving, writers who planted the seed inside him which, regardless of the scant nourishment and care he was able to provide it with, would eventually come into bloom.

Sometimes, in order to appreciate the value of what he had even more, not to let it lose any of its sparkle, Wells wondered what might have become of him if the miraculous sequence of events that had thrust him into the arms of literature had never occurred. And the answer was always the same. If the curious accident had never taken place, Wells was certain he would now be working in some pharmacy or other, bored witless and unable to believe that his contribution to life’s great melting pot was to be of such little import. What would life be like without any purpose, without any definite goal? He could imagine no greater misery than to drift through life aimlessly, frustrated, knowing nothing could ever satisfy him, building a dull, meaningless existence on the basis of luck and a series of muddled decisions, an existence interchangeable with that of his neighbor, aspiring only to the brief, fragile, and elusive happiness of simple folk. Happily, his father’s talent for cricket had saved him from mediocrity, exposing him less to the vagaries of life, turning him into someone with a purpose, turning him into a writer.

The journey had by no means been an easy one. It was as if just when he glimpsed his vocation, just when he knew which path to take, the wind destined to hamper his progress had also risen, like an unavoidable accompaniment, a fierce persistent wind in the form of his mother. For it seemed that besides being one of the most wretched creatures on the planet, Sarah Wells’s sole mission in life was to bring up her sons Bertie, Fred, and Frank to be hardworking members of society, which for her meant a shop assistant, baker, or some other kind of selfless soul who, like Atlas proudly but discreetly carried the world on their shoulders. Wells’s determination to amount to something more was a disappointment to her, although one should not attach too much importance to that, because it had been merely adding insult to injury. Little Bertie had been a disappointment to his mother from the very moment he was born for having had the gall to emerge from her womb a fully equipped male. Nine months earlier she had only consented to cross the threshold of her despicable husband’s bedroom on condition he gave her a little girl to replace the one she had lost.

It is hardly surprising that after such inauspicious beginnings, Wells’s relationship with his mother should continue in the same vein. Once the pleasant respite afforded by his broken leg had ended—after the village doctor, who, without being asked, had kindly prolonged it by setting the bone badly and being obliged to break it again to correct his mistake—little Bertie was sent to a commercial academy in Bromley, where his two brothers had gone before him although their teacher, Mr. Morley, had been unable to make anything out of them. The boy, however, quickly proved that all the peas in a pod are not necessarily the same. Mr. Morley was so astonished by Wells’s dazzling intelligence that he even turned a blind eye to the non-payment of the boy’s registration fees. However, this preferential treatment did not stop his mother from uprooting her son from the milieu of blackboards and school desks where he felt so at home, and sending him to train as an apprentice at the Rodgers and Denyer bakery in Windsor. After three months of toiling from seven thirty in the morning until eight at night, with a short break for lunch taken in a cramped, windowless cellar, Wells feared his youthful optimism would slowly and inevitably begin to fade, just as it had with his elder brothers, whom he barely recognized as the cheerful, determined fellows they had once been. And so he did everything in his power to prove to all and sundry that he did not have the makings of a baker’s assistant, abandoning himself more than ever to his frequent bouts of daydreaming. It came to the point where the owners had no choice but to dismiss the young man who mixed up the orders and spent most of his time dreaming in a corner. Thanks to the intervention of one of his mother’s second cousins, he was then sent to assist a relative in running a school in Wookey where he would also be able to complete his teacher training. Unfortunately, this employment, far more in keeping with his aspirations, ended almost as soon as it began when it was discovered that the headmaster was an impostor who had obtained his post by falsifying his academic qualifications. The by now not so little Bertie once again fell prey to his mother’s obsessions, which deflected him from his true destiny, sending him off on another mistaken path. And so it was that aged just fourteen, Wells began working in the pharmacy run by Mr. Cowap, who was instructed to train him as a chemist. However, the pharmacist soon realized the boy was far too gifted to be wasted on such an occupation and placed him in the hands of Horace Byatt, headmaster at Midhurst Grammar School, who was on the lookout for exceptional students who could imbue his establishment with the academic respectability it needed. Wells easily excelled over the other boys. They were on the whole mediocre students, and he was instantly noticed by Byatt, who contrived with the pharmacist to provide the talented boy with the best education they could. But his mother soon frustrated the plot hatched by the pair of idle philanthropists by sending her son to another bakery, this time in Southsea. Wells spent two years there in a state of intense confusion, trying to understand why that fierce wind insisted on blowing him off course each time he found himself back on the right path. Life at Edwin Hyde’s Bread Emporium was suspiciously similar to a sojourn in hell. It consisted of thirteen hours” hard work, followed by a night spent shut away in the airless hut that passed for a dormitory, where the apprentices slept so close together that even their dreams got muddled up. A few years earlier, convinced her husband’s fecklessness would end by bankrupting their china shop business, his mother had accepted the post of housekeeper at Uppark Manor, a run-down estate on Harting Down where as a girl she had worked as a maid. It was to here that Wells wrote her a series of despairing, accusatory letters, which out of respect I will not reproduce here, alternating the most childish demands with the most sophisticated arguments in a vain attempt to persuade her to set him free from his captivity. As he watched with anguish the future he so longed for slip through his fingers, Wells did his utmost to try to weaken his mother’s resolve. He asked her how she expected him to be able to help her in her old age on a shop assistant’s meager wage, pointing out that with the studies he intended to pursue he would obtain a wonderful position; he accused her of being intolerant, stupid, even threatening to commit suicide or other more dreadful acts that would stain the family name forever. But none of this weakened his mother’s resolve to turn him into a respectable baker’s boy. It took his former champion Horace Byatt, overwhelmed by growing numbers of pupils, to come to the rescue, offering him a post at a salary of twenty pounds for the first year, and forty thereafter. Wells was quick to wave these figures desperately in front of the nose of his mother, who reluctantly allowed him to leave the bakery, tired of all her vain efforts to keep her son on the right track. Relieved, the grateful Wells placed himself at the orders of his savior, whose expectations he was anxious to live up to. During the day he taught the younger boys, and at night he studied to finish his teacher training, eagerly devouring everything he could find about biology, physics, astronomy, and other science subjects. The reward for his titanic efforts was a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where he would study under none other than Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous biologist who had been Darwin’s lieutenant during his famous debates with Bishop Wilberforce.