The Other Side of a Frontier, page 24
Mother supported him vigorously; in fact, as we soon saw, with unnatural vigour. It was irony on her part. Our debt to this family and to this lady was total, she said. The lady appeared almost before Father finished speaking, which took my father and mother aback, my mother’s hair (as usual) being not quite in a state for receiving another woman. And we were taken aback too. We had expected perhaps another operatic Mrs Murdo in red velvet; instead a tall, beautiful young woman with burning brown eyes, and black hair, came in. Her eyelashes fluttered. She had alluring lips and, on the upper lip, a few black hairs at the corners which, before the fashion changed, made women sensually disturbing. Her voice was a shade mannish, low and practical, she was slender and wore a business-like coat and skirt with a white blouse. She struck us as elegant, even fashionable. To our delight she teasingly addressed our father as ‘Father’ which made him blush. She even called him ‘Sawdon’; it was as if she had called him Lord. She put us so much at our ease that we loved her at once and got boisterous; my father deferred to her and so did my mother who also blushed.
One of her first questions to me was: when was I going to sit for a scholarship to the College? This was startling to me and I looked for help to my father.
‘When he is ready,’ said my father. ‘I do not want him to imagine that just because his father has his own business he has only to sit about waiting for everything to fall into his lap.’
‘Which school are you going to send him to?’ she turned to my mother.
‘I really don’t know,’ said my mother.
‘We are considering the matter,’ said my father in his board-room manner. ‘It may be this or that. It may be the College, though we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. There may be other, better schools, than the College.’
My father’s evasions stopped. Certainty appeared and a look of polite but firm rebuke came to his face. He liked the gaiety of the lady but he was not going to allow her to lead the way in his family or anywhere else. The matter was raised to a graver, higher and crushing tribune.
‘He will go where the Divine Mind wishes him to go, for he is a reflection of the Divine Mind, as Mrs Eddy says.’
This puzzling remark lifted me into a region I had never heard of before; my head seemed to stretch painfully. I thought someone had put on me a hat that came down over my ears.
My mother looked appealingly and mistrustfully at the lady. ‘Are you in this too?’ she seemed to signal anxiously, but what she said was: ‘I never had much education myself.’
‘We were brought up very poor but my parents were careful. We had to earn our living early, my brother and I. We worked hard and went to evening classes. Father made us get our diplomas,’ said the refined lady in her precise way. ‘My brother qualified as an accountant.’
My spirits fell. After the gaieties of Ipswich we were once more caught by the doctrine of hard work and bleak merit. Mother’s neck wobbled in a pained way as if she had been shot, but was too lady-like to mention it.
‘If I may offer a thought there,’ said my father, for he had not quite lost touch with the charms of an easy life. ‘What these boys need, what we all need, is the Truth.’
‘Stick to the point,’ said my mother, desperately blinking at him.
‘I’m sure you’ve been too busy to think about it yet,’ said the lady tactfully, but Mother did not take it as tact, and gave her one of her looks.
‘Why don’t you do something about it, making a fool of me in front of that woman?’ my mother shouted at my father when the lady went. ‘And why don’t you get those boys to a school?’
Father pointed out that now my mother had a friend and we all had a friend and that soon our general tone would be raised by this fortunate contact. This did not happen. In the years to come my mother kept herself apart from this family.
‘Who was her father? Only a man on the railway and the mother takes lodgers. Why are we beholden to her?’ Mother said. For many years the lady was known to us only as ‘Miss H’.
There was my father sitting in that office with ‘that woman’ all the week; Mother said: why didn’t he stay with her if she was so wonderful. We know she put up the money. How did she get it? Cheese paring. My mother was not going to cheapen herself by visiting them. She might not be educated but she knew the difference between sixpence and a shilling and had been brought up straight. We were shocked. Mother was jealous. There were two women: Mrs Eddy and this lady, Miss H.
And why had we got to be so polite to her? The Business, that’s what it was, Mother said. The Business. Our father had ceased to be our father. He now became ‘the Business’. It was a shadow in our fireproof room.
And then this woman, Miss H, was a woman and women are woman-like, Mother said. Not that she had any doubts about Father, for she knew he was true, but if women don’t get one thing, they go for another. They don’t let go.
As for Father being true, this is as certain as anything can be. He really hated women. He despised them. They existed to be his servants, for his mother – as my mother said – had waited on him hand and foot. Of course he charmed women; they liked talking to him, he appealed to their masochism. If they fought back or showed any signs of taking charge of him, his face went cold. His favourite gesture was to hold up his hand, palm upwards and wag it insultingly up and down, silently telling them to shut up. Their role was to listen to him and he had a lot to say. But once let them discuss, differ or suggest another idea, and the hand went up, playfully at first but, if they persisted, he was blunt with them. He described these incidents to us often. His phrase was ‘I put her in her place’. It was unlucky that he had not met Mrs Eddy. She was dead. It was unlucky also that in his trade most of the workers were women. It must be said that several of these, who admired his vitality, loved him all their lives. Perhaps Miss H the bookkeeper did; Mother scornfully thought so.
At Dulwich the question of schools became grandiose for my brother and me. We were the sons of a Managing Director: our value rose. Prospectuses came in from half the great Public Schools of England. Eton and Harrow were dismissed easily; it was astonishing how many boys from such schools uttered false cheques in the course of a decade and got into the papers. We saw ourselves at Dulwich College, swaggering arm in arm like the College prefects in their tasselled hats. We walked behind them listening with awe to their astonishing man-of-the-world talk about girls. We caught drawling hints of musical plays and lavish disputes about whether the Indian Civil Service or the Army were to be preferred. One day we heard a youth pity another whose father was in a Line regiment. These snobberies had – I now see – the effect of gin upon our unaccustomed fancies. We began to live double lives. I read the prospectuses eagerly. At these schools one was away from home, and that I longed for. But I saw the fatal difficulty: I knew no Latin. For twopence cadged off my mother I bought a second-hand Latin Primer. I decided to teach myself and enter paradise.
I was defeated on the very first page. There was a sentence that ran: ‘Inflection is a change in the form of a word.’ There was no dictionary in the house. Mother had never heard of the word ‘inflection’ nor had Father. But I had heard of ‘form’. But how could a word have form? It wasn’t a thing like a table, or a vase. I drew a pencil line carefully following the shapes of the letters round a word or two; that led nowhere. I skipped to ‘mensa’ but what on earth did ‘by with or from a table’ mean? I’d never heard anyone say it. Mother hadn’t either. As for the verb ‘sum’ mentioned idolatrously by my grandfather when I was five or six, I couldn’t find it in the book.
One morning there was a click at the letter-box and Mother said, in a panic: ‘What was that?’
‘Someone at the door,’ we said, but all stood still, knowing that this was a dangerous moment.
‘Stay here,’ said my mother. ‘Vic, open the kitchen door and peep up the hall.’ I peeped. No person stood beyond the coloured glass of the front door, which threw a sad and bloody light on the passage, but a letter was on the linoleum.
‘A letter,’ I said.
‘Wait,’ she said, drying her hands on her apron; then all advanced towards the letter. My mother stopped about a yard away looking cautiously at it. Then she made a dart at it and picked it up. It was only a circular.
‘It give me a turn,’ said Mother, whose English had deteriorated in the last year.
It was a circular begging on behalf of Treloar’s Home for Crippled Children and contained pictures of the school rooms, and workshops, the dormitories, the playgrounds by the sea in the south of England where these children lived. I envied them. How lucky to be a cripple. If only, in some game of football in the Park, I could get my leg broken, go on crutches and, helped on to a train, go to this place. The thought was luxurious. For an hour or two I tried limping.
Then, with the suddenness with which everything happened to us, Father having gone off at seven to be at his workroom before the ‘hands’ got there to see they did not cheat him of his time, Mother put the two youngest children with the next-door neighbour and marched my brother and me for a mile and a half, muttering to herself, to Rosendale Road School, near Herne Hill.
‘I’ve brought these two boys,’ she said, giving us a push, to a dapper little man in a tail-coat and who looked like a frosted pen-nib. His name was Timms.
What Mr Timms said I don’t know, but I was aware of what I looked like. Mother had a hard time making both ends meet and, on a day like this, wanted us to be dressed in something respectable. The day before she put the sewing-machine on the dining-room table, took out a paper pattern and set about making me some trousers. She made many of her own dresses and a lot of our clothes; indeed, if she was making a dress for herself or my sister, I was often the model. I had to stand up while she pinned patterns all over me. She was often puzzled by the strips of pattern that were left over. If only she had her cousin Emmy or better still Cousin Louie, the dressmaker, she would say; for it was a fate with her often to cut out, say, two left sleeves, or to be short of a quarter of a yard on the length. She knitted our stockings and never learned how to turn a heel, so that a double heel often hung over the backs of our boots: jerseys for us she never finished; but for herself – for she did not want to make victims of us – she would knit recklessly on while I read the instructions to her, and turn out narrow tubes of wool that she would stretch, laughing till she cried, to her knees. She had to pay for the material for her dressmaking out of the housekeeping money and she would raid any free material in sight. I have described her attacks on our curtains. Her own bloomers were a byword: for in gay moments she would haul up her long skirts above her knees and show my father – who was always shocked – what could be done with a chair cover or something robust of that kind. ‘You want me in the business instead of “that woman”,’ she’d say.
For she had a vengeful streak in her, and looking at our father, the impressive Managing Director, and counting his suits and knowing how she couldn’t get a penny out of him for our clothes, she attacked his wardrobe. She found a pair of striped trousers of the kind worn with morning dress. Just the thing for me. Out came the scissors. Slicing the enormous trousers roughly at the knees she saw that my brother and I could get into them both at once. She was upset by our laughter. She now slashed at the trousers again and narrowed them to my size. The insoluble difficulty was the fly buttons; these she pulled round to the side of one leg; cutting and then tacking her way up the middle while they were on me at the final try-on, she sewed me up totally in front.
‘I won’t be able to go, Mum,’ I said.
She was flabbergasted, but in her careless way, she snipped a couple of stitches in her tacking.
These were the trousers I was wearing as I stood before Mr Timms, very pleased by Father’s fashionable stripes and willing to show any boy who was interested the original touch of having Savile Row fly buttons down the side of one leg. What I feared was happening; the hole was lengthening in front. I could feel an alarming draught. I dared not look down. I hoped Mr Timms would not look down, as my mother chatted on and on about our family. Nothing happened. I went to my classroom; at playtime I dared not run, for fear the tacking would go. When I pulled the thread to tighten it I was left with a length of thread hanging down from the vulnerable part. When I went home after school the thread went altogether and I had to cover myself with my hand.
So my first day at Rosendale Road School began. Wearing my father’s classy cut-downs I knew the distinction of our family and its awkward difference from the families of all the other children. No one else had a Managing Director’s trousers on. No one else had (I was sure) our dark adventures. We were a race apart; abnormal but proud of our stripes, longing for the normality we saw around us.
I was eleven. Between the age often and fourteen a boy reaches a first maturity and wholeness as a person; it is broken up by adolescence and not remade until many years later. That eager period between ten and fourteen is the one in which one can learn anything. Even in the times when most children had no schooling at all, they could be experts in a trade: the children who went up chimneys, worked in cotton mills, pushed coster barrows may have been sick, exhausted and ill-fed, but they were at a temporary height of their intelligence and powers. This is the delightful phase of boyhood, all curiosity, energy and spirit.
I was ready for a decisive experience, if it came. It did come. At Rosendale Road School I decided to become a writer. The decision did not drop out of the sky and was not the result of intellectual effort. It began in the classroom and was settled in the school lavatory. It came, of course, because of a personal influence: the influence of a schoolmaster called Bartlett. There were and are good and bad elementary schools in London. They are nearly as much created by their districts and their children as by their teachers. The children at Rosendale Road, which was a large school, were a mixture of working class and lower middles with a few foreigners and colonials – Germans, Portuguese, Australians, French and one or two Indians. It was a mixed school. We sat next to girls in class and the class was fifty or sixty strong. We had overgrown louts from Peabody’s Buildings and little titches, the sons of coalmen, teachers, railwaymen, factory workers, sailors, soldiers, draughtsmen, printers, policemen, shop assistants and clerks and salesmen. The Germans were the children of people in the pharmaceutical trades; they had been better educated than we were and had more pocket money. One dark satanically handsome boy owned a ‘phonograph’ and claimed to be a direct descendant of Sir Francis Drake and did romantic pictures of galleons. At fourteen the girls would leave school, work in offices, in factories like my father’s or become waitresses or domestic servants.
In most schools such a crowd was kept in order by the cane. Girls got it as much as the boys and snivelled afterwards. To talk in class was a crime, to leave one’s desk inconceivable. Discipline was meant to encourage subservience, and to squash rebellion – very undesirable in children who would grow up to obey orders from their betters. No child here would enter the ruling classes unless he was very gifted and won scholarship after scholarship. A great many boys from these schools did so and did rise to high places; but they had to slave and crush part of their lives, to machine themselves so that they became brain alone. They ground away at their lessons, and, for all their boyhood and youth and perhaps all their lives, they were in the ingenious torture chamber of the examination halls. They were brilliant, of course, and some when they grew up tended to be obsequious to the ruling class and ruthless to the rest, if they were not tired out. Among them were many who were emotionally infantile.
A reaction against this fierce system of education had set in at the turn of the century. Socialism and the scientific revolution – which Wells has described – had moved many people. New private schools for the well-off were beginning to break with the traditions of the nineteenth century and a little of the happy influence seeped down to ourselves. Mr Bartlett represented it. The Education Officer had instructed Mr Timms to give Mr Bartlett a free hand for a year or so and to introduce something like the Dalton or tutorial system into our class. The other teachers hated him and it; we either made so much noise that the rest of the school could hardly get on with their work, or were so silent that teachers would look over the frosted glass of the door to see if we had gone off for a holiday.
Mr Bartlett was a stumpy, heavy-shouldered young man with a broad swarthy face, large brown eyes and a lock of black hair wagging romantically over his forehead. He looked like a boxer, lazy in his movements and his right arm hung back as he walked to the blackboard as though he was going to swing a blow at it. He wore a loose tweed jacket with baggy pockets in which he stuck books, chalks and pencils and, by some magnetism he could silence a class almost without a word. He never used the cane. Since we could make as much noise as we liked, he got silence easily when he wanted it. Manners scarcely existed among us except as a scraping and snivelling; he introduced us to refinements we had never heard of and his one punishment took the form of an additional and excruciating lesson in this subject. He would make us write a formal letter of apology. We would make a dozen attempts before he was satisfied. And, when, at last, we thought it was done he would point out that it was still incomplete. It must be put in an envelope, properly addressed: not to Mr Bartlett, not to Mr W.W. Bartlett, not as I did, to Mr W.W. Bartlett Esquire, but to the esquire without the mister. It often took us a whole day and giving up all the pleasant lessons the rest were doing, to work out the phrasing of these letters of shame.
