The Other Side of a Frontier, page 23
At this period my father – who was eventually to become very fat indeed, going up to eighteen stone in his time – was a slender young man. He looked grave, his fine brown eyes seemed to burn, and he could change from the effusive to the canny hard look of the brisk young Yorkshireman out for the ‘brass’. But there was sometimes a hollow-eyed and haunted look on his face. The fact is – and this is what he told my dumbstruck mother when they talked together – he had had a wretched childhood. My grandfather, so benevolent to me, had been a harsh, indeed a savage, father.
I had seen the minister in his easy country days, idling with his small congregations of country folk, talking of Carlyle and Ruskin and English history. My father had known him as the disciplinarian not long out of the Army, living from hand to mouth in industrial towns, sending his children off to school hungry. They were forbidden to sit down at meals: it would make them soft. He made them stand rigid at the table in silence while they ate their food. His sons were in barracks. My father and his brother were not allowed out of the house after six in the evening, not even when they were grown up. What schools they went to was never made clear to me by my father. He evaded the subject, either out of shame or because he hated being definite about anything. I know he had a French lesson for he had learned by heart the phrase ‘Trois hommes voyageaient en France’. Education was expensive and my grandfather, who used to talk at large about the beauties of education, seems to have been able to give little to his two sons. He lived – as my father was to do – in a dream. At fourteen my father had gone to work as a grocer’s errand boy and then worked behind the counter. At sixteen or so, he seems to have had an interesting friendship with a young doctor in the village. This – in view of what I shall tell later about my father – was important. The boy was eager to become a doctor or surgeon which would have been far beyond my grandfather’s means. One evening he went to the doctor’s surgery and watched him dress a man’s poisoned thumb. The sight of pus and blood was too much: my father fainted. This led to delay in getting home. He arrived there after dark just before eight in the evening, to find my grandfather waiting with a carriage whip in his hand. Whipping was common in the family, but now my father was nearly a man. My grandfather roared at him for disobeying orders, accused him of drinking or going after women – a scene which was to be re-enacted by Father in his turn and for similar reasons, when my brother Cyril and I were in our late teens – and when Father answered back he was struck across the face and the back by the whip, two or three hard blows. That was enough: hatred had been growing for years. Father went up to his room and in the middle of the night climbed out of his bedroom window, hid in the railway station and went off to York next morning to stay with an uncle. Then he went to London. He had a cousin, Sawdon, in the rag trade: after short jobs in the drapery, Father arrived in glory in Kentish Town.
‘I could tell,’ said my mother, feeling sorry for him as well as being in awe, ‘he had never met a girl before. And his mother standing there, doing nothing, seeing her son horse-whipped – I could have limbed the old …’
Mother was an expert in leaving her sentences unfinished.
Daniels was a Wellsian establishment. It was a good ‘crib’ or berth and the workers were scared of losing it. From Mother’s account of it, it was the leading humorous establishment in North London. ‘What us girls used to get up to. The nerve we had, dodging across the street, under the horses’ heads, playing tricks on your poor father, he looked so stuck up till you got to know him, putting fly papers on old Daniels’s chair … Oh, I was a young limb. One day I tipped a whole pile of hat boxes, the white cardboard ones dear, on top of your dad. Us girls were always giggling round corners. Frank’ – this was Ada’s young man – ‘was a cruel mimic. Everything was in farthings in those days and poor Mr Thomas could not pronounce his “th’s”. Frank used to go up to him and say, large as life, “What’s the price of this, Mr Thomas? Free free farvings?” and Old Thomas would go wild and say “I’ll free free farvings you with a fump.”’
My mother’s laugh was always near hysteria. She would sit on her chair by the fire with a long skirt pulled up over her knees to the elastic of her grey bloomers and rock back and forth as she talked. And when she came to the comic point she would spread her excited fingers over her face and stare through the gaps at us and go into fits until her untidy hair started to come through.
Frank’s other gift was to say people’s names backwards. This kept the shop ‘rocking’. Ecirtaeb Nitram was my mother’s name. My father’s, which was difficult, became Retlaw Tetchirp.
‘Dad didn’t like it, you know he’s proud.’
Father was certainly easily offended. He soon told her something that alarmed her: he was not going to stay at Daniels at the end of the year. ‘My name’s Walker,’ he said. He was going out ‘on the road’. He was going to get a job with a ‘good comm. and Al expenses’. Mother cunningly persuaded him to come and lodge at her mother’s house: he noticed that she was a flirt and playing him up with one of the other assistants, so he moved so as to keep possession of her.
He had a shock when he met Gran. There had been no drink at the Manse. At Medina Road someone was always going round to the off-licence. And Gran was not very clean. She could not cook as well as his mother and he complained that London water was hard and did not get the dirt out of the pores of one’s skin. He sent his shirts and underclothes back to Yorkshire to be washed and starched or ironed by his mother. Whatever you liked to say about his relations in Yorkshire, he pointed out, they were not servants, they didn’t kotow; they didn’t keep pubs and they were all out to improve their position. The Martins were stagnant and, like all southerners, they were all servile smiles and lies to your face. When he was in a rage with Mother in the years to come I am sorry to say that he would shout: ‘I raised you from the gutter’ and, with a glance of appeal to us, would say, ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’
These insults were no more than Yorkshire plain-speaking. All his relatives talked cheerfully like this to one another. As a Cockney Mother had a tongue, too. She would mock Father’s piety with phrases like ‘two-faced Wesleyans’ and ‘Hallelujah, keep your hands off’.
Gran Martin, of course, hated Father. She called him only by his surname for years. Father did not hide his feelings that the Martin family needed cleaning up. Morally, in particular, for he was soon taking my mother on Sundays to hear the famous preachers at the City Temple. Spurgeon and others. He loved their dramatic manner. One of these preachers told how, when he was coming into the City Temple that morning, he heard two young sparks debating whether to go in or not. ‘Damn it, what odds,’ said one and went in. My father admired his remark. He quoted it for years. He wanted religion to smarten up and get snappy. He liked the evangelical singing and sang well for he had been trained in one of the excellent Yorkshire choirs. But he sang mainly hymns, his favourite being ‘Tell Me the Old, Old Story’ which came so richly from him that it brought us nearly to tears when we were very young. He knew how much preachers were paid. ‘Big men’ he would say. He liked ‘big men’. It was the age when the Victorian Grand Old Man or Great Men were beginning to be succeeded by the Big, like Selfridge and the new race of great shopkeepers in London, Manchester and Chicago. He did not really distinguish between the big shopkeepers and the popular Nonconformist preachers, who had also broken with the theology of the Victorian age: for suddenly money was about, commerce was expanding, there was a chance for the lower middle class. They would have a slice of the money the middles had sat so obdurately on for so long. The difference between ‘goods’ and ‘the good’ was fading. My father took to smoking cigars and my mother, hunching her pretty shoulders a little before his self-confident ambition, also sparkled and admired. He always ended by saying how hungry he was. Oysters – a poor man’s food in those days – were pretty cheap. My father’s later size was due to early hunger. He ate to make up for the craving of his childhood. He became cheerfully gluttonous. He talked for hours about food as much as he did about religion. Sixty years later when he died his last coherent words were: ‘That woman meant well but she did not give me enough to eat.’ He was speaking of his landlady. It was untrue. The hunger of his boyhood grew and grew as he neared death.
Beatrice Martin’s idea of pleasure was Hampstead Heath Fair and the music halls. My father could not stand a dirty joke; and he mildly complained that in any music hall she was the first in the audience to see the joke and give her hysterical laugh so that voices from the gallery shouted admiringly at her and egged her on.
So my father and mother courted in Finsbury Park and Parliament Hill, went boating out on the Thames, rioted with the mob on Mafeking Night, he carrying her on his shoulder round Trafalgar Square while she waved a Union Jack. He walked out, as he had promised, from Daniels and got another berth; then the minister married them and they set off for Ipswich and bankruptcy, where Gran and Mother’s sister, Ada, later widowed, appeared too. The battle between North and South was on.
…
Chapter 6
We were off again, of course. The year’s soft and lazy affair with my birthplace had passed. We had scarcely heard the word God at all for a twelvemonth in this pagan holiday. We had made two or three more visits to our Aunt Ada’s. I see her, on one of them, duck-breasted, wearing a fanciful dress and under a large Edwardian hat, raising her lorgnette to the one or two nudes in a local picture exhibition and te-he-he-ing in her bird-like way to me, telling me to come over and admire. Mother would have gone pink and pushed me out of the gallery. Uncle, a believer in practical education, sent my brother and me up the vertical ladder of one of the towers of his waterworks on Rushmere Common and instructed us in the digging of artesian wells and the economics of diesel power. There was an election that year and a crowd of us went into town singing:
Vote, vote, vote for Mr Churchman
Kick old Goddard in the eye.
At Felixstowe we saw the sea for the first time. It seemed like a wide-eyed face pressing against our faces and tingling in our hair. Mother talked of ships going down on the Goodwin sands and shouted from the shingle: ‘Don’t go in deeper.’ An hotel caught fire.
In Yorkshire and in Suffolk there had been peace. No one spoke about money or the struggle for existence; there was none of our family talk about ‘getting on’; there was no anxiety. My brother and I had the freedom of country life; we need not ‘get on’ at all. These influences slowly made me feel that although I was not as clever as many boys at school, I was clever enough and egotistical enough to be able to do what I liked with my life, and that my mind was already deciding what this should be. Money would have nothing to do with it. Just as I could feel myself grow and urge myself to grow more, so I felt that the important thing was to be alone – alone in the street, in the fells or on the Suffolk commons. And always walking and moving away.
My aunt’s pictures gave me a hint of how this would be possible: not her gravy-coloured Academy landscapes, but the water-colours of Barlow Woods. This gentleman was alive. He was also young. He was witty, my aunt said. He sat down alone in a field by the Orwell and painted the trees by the water, the tide ebbing from the silvered mud banks. I liked painting and I wondered, when I walked to the lane where Gainsborough had painted his elms, whether some of that influence would fall upon me. The thought of being a writer had not occurred to me. I did feel that I could choose some studious kind of life but the barriers to knowledge seemed to me far too great. I would not have to read or know, to be a painter. A picture took one instantly through a door into another world, one like our own, but silent. There were no raised voices. There were no rows. And there, alive, was Barlow Woods creating these scenes. I never saw him. Whether he was a good painter or a poor one, I do not know. But, unlike ours at home, his pictures were done in real paint. In Ipswich, in that peaceful interregnum of my boyhood, the idea of being a painter began to dawdle in my mind.
But we left.
There is a short tunnel on the south side of Ipswich station and we all came out of it in a cloud of smoke and steam, with the solemn knowledge that we were now heading for London’s aching skies. We had one glimpse of the blue spear of sea in the Stour estuary and of the sailing boats of Manningtree – except for those days at Felixstowe we were sea-starved children and often went into moans of self-pity because of this. We had said our last Suffolk ‘Farewell, boa’ to the lazy and forgotten country of slow-talking Suffolk people who had been stunned by the east wind. We got two shillings and some cultural advice each from Uncle: not bad.
We arrived on a dull May day, in London, at the pleasant suburb of Dulwich. The centre of Dulwich is still a Georgian village of fine houses and stately trees. There was the College and the old College chapel; and near it the small and famous Art Gallery. Everywhere one saw notice-boards reading Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift. College boys in their blue striped caps were in the streets. Ruskin, always dogging me, had often visited the Gallery; Browning had walked in the woods that overhung the village; and the Crystal Palace, built for the exhibition of 1851 and moved to Sydenham Hill, dominated all with its strange glass towers and its lolloping glass dome, like a sad and empty conservatory. From the Parade, at the top, one could see the dome of St Paul’s only a few miles away, and a distant slit of the Thames.
We noticed that the family fortunes had gone up a little when we got to Dulwich. Our destination was not the sedate part of the district but on the outskirts at the Norwood end. We found ourselves in a rather taller villa than usual in a street where dozens of houses were to let, for this was the period of the Edwardian housing slump. Father was indignant at the rent: 16s. a week. He was often in arrears with it. But the house had one distinctive feature – he proudly pointed out – dark-blue fireproof paper in its front room.
But the London air was mottled with worry. We had come back to a father who had changed his character. The merry, bouncing fellow with the waxed moustaches and the cigar, the genial carver of the commercial rooms, the singer of bits of Kathleen Mavourneen had shaved off his moustache, and had been replaced by a man whose naked face was stern. In the past year he also had experienced freedom – freedom from us. He had been living in a comfortable furnished flat and had had leisure to remake his own life. He had found another self. We had come back and this new self was trapped in a situation he could not get out of. He stared at us and the corners of his mouth drooped: he saw the ineluctable. When I was eighteen he once said bitterly: ‘I’m warning you. Don’t make my mistake. I married too young, before I knew my own mind.’ I hated him then and even more for saying this. At Dulwich it was plain that he had passed through some crisis and not a simple one. The idea of righteousness was very powerful in him, despite his unreliability; it was this idea, I believe, that began to corrupt him. An emotional struggle – I would guess – and then righteousness killed his heart. His gaiety vanished. Self-punished, he slowly drifted into punishing us. How else to account for his black moods?
But his losses had their gains – perhaps after all the will meant more than the heart to him. One short-term gain for him was his new religion which, since Mother rejected it, he kept to himself. We knew nothing about it, but we knew it existed. He was determined to keep that, a romantic compensation and counsellor which corrupted him very quickly. Or, perhaps he corrupted it. He once told me more about his conversion. Mother was wrong in saying that Cousin Dick’s peculiar recovery from chronic dyspepsia was the main cause. The decisive thing – and the decisive would always be personal for him – was the death of a friend of Cousin Dick’s. This man was dying of tuberculosis but believed that he could be cured by Christian Science treatment. The worse he got, the more he believed; and just before he died he declared that he knew it was ‘the Truth’ and made my father swear to stick to it. It was this tragic failure, arriving at a moment when I think Father himself felt he was in a desperate situation, that converted my father.
The second gain was remarkable. He had refused to give in to bad luck in his business and now he had at last succeeded. In that year while he was alone in Dulwich and with the help of the clever woman who had got him back from Liverpool in the nick of time, he at last realized his dream. And this time it was no deception. He had got out of the despised retail trade; he had left the jaunty and vulgar world of the commercial traveller and out of that came one remarkable change, one that separated us from him, as if there had been a real divorce. His name had changed. Until now, he had been Walter S. Pritchett; now the Walter was dropped. His second name appeared. He was Sawdon Pritchett, a name so sonorous, so official, so like a public meeting that we went off into corners and sniggered at it. He would, all the same, lower his eyes with his touching modesty when he said it. He pulled out a card to establish his new name with us. There it was:
Sawdon Pritchett Ltd.,
Art Needlework Manufacturers,
Offices and Showrooms Newgate Street.
‘Opposite the Old Bailey,’ he pointed out.
When will you pay me
Said the Bells of Old Bailey,
When I grow rich
Said the bells of Shoreditch
Mother sang. Ominously too.
He took us to his office. Pigeons laid their eggs on the dirty balcony of his floor of the building. The crowds queued outside the Courts for the murder trials and down below, on the wood-blocked streets, scavenger boys in white coats dashed in and out of the traffic with brushes and wide pans to sweep up the horse manure. My brother and I envied their dangerous and busy life and their wide-brimmed hats.
Father’s elevation and dignity had a silencing effect on our home. The words, Managing Director, put him in a trance. He told us that we now had many privileges; first we were the children of a Managing Director, living in a refined neighbourhood among neighbours who would study our manners. We had also the privilege of living within a couple of hundred yards of a remarkable family and an even more remarkable woman, the secretary to the Company whose brother, high in financial circles, played tennis at a most exclusive club. My father doubted if this family would feel able to know us immediately, but if by some generous condescension they did, we would remember to have our hands and shoes clean, brush our hair, raise our caps and never sit down until told to do so. Father’s face had lost its roundness. It had become square, naked and authoritative. It also looked pained; as if he were feeling a strange, imposed constraint.
