Born in 1914, Aickman was the son of architect William Arthur Aickman and worked briefly with his father, a notable eccentric. The younger Aickman was a man of diverse interests (co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association and chair of the London Opera Society included) and did not publish his first stories until 1951, in the collection We Are For The Dark. Half the stories in that collection were written by Aickman and half of them by Elizabeth Jane Howard, his lover at the time
