It was a small
business
and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married.
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
I saw them as a couple of those great
Egyptian statues that I’d seen pictures of in the penny encyclopedia, enormous stone
statues thirty feet high, sitting on their thrones opposite one another, with their hands on
their knees and a faint mysterious smile on their faces.
How it came back to me! That peculiar feeling — it was only a feeling, you couldn’t
describe it as an activity — that we used to call ‘Church’. The sweet corpsy smell, the
rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light
from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups
could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary. You took it for
granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were
texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O. T. by heart. Even now my
head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the
sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breeches. Followed them from Dan until thou
come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never
understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting
stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary
rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and
Hashbadada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on
camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt
offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed
by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and
the wheeze of the organ.
That was the world I went back to when I saw the poster about King Zog. For a moment I
didn’t merely remember it, I was IN it. Of course such impressions don’t last more than a
few seconds. A moment later it was as though I’d opened my eyes again, and I was forty-
five and there was a traffic jam in the Strand. But it had left a kind of after-effect behind.
Sometimes when you come out of a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up
from deep water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though it was back in
1900 that I’d been breathing real air. Even now, with my eyes open, so to speak, all those
bloody fools hustling to and fro, and the posters and the petrol-stink and the roar of the
engines, seemed to me less real than Sunday morning in Lower Binfield thirty-eight years
ago.
I chucked away my cigar and walked on slowly. I could smell the corpse-smell. In a
manner of speaking I can smell it now. I’m back in Lower Binfield, and the year’s 1900.
Beside the horse- trough in the market-place the carrier’s horse is having its nose- bag. At
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
Lady Rampling’s carriage is driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed
breeches with his arms folded. Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe Chamberlain. The recruiting-
sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight blue overalls, and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down
twisting his moustache. The drunks are puking in the yard behind the George. Vicky’s at
Windsor, God’s in heaven, Christ’s on the cross, Jonah’s in the whale, Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og
the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another — not doing
anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed place, like a couple of fire-dogs,
or the Lion and the Unicorn.
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong
to it. So do you.
PART II
1
The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster was so
different from the world I live in now that you might have a bit of difficulty in believing I
ever belonged to it.
I suppose by this time you’ve got a kind of picture of me in your mind — a fat middle-
aged bloke with false teeth and a red face — and subconsciously you’ve been imagining
that I was just the same even when I was in my cradle. But forty-five years is a long time,
and though some people don’t change and develop, others do. I’ve changed a great deal,
and I’ve had my ups and downs, mostly ups. It may seem queer, but my father would
probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He’d think it a wonderful thing
that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now
I’m a little above my origin, and at other times I’ve touched levels that we should never
have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the
answer will be ‘Which war? ’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of
when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in ‘93,
and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row
that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I’ve several other memories that would date
from about a year earlier than that.
The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone
passage that led from the kitchen to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the
way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was
my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I can still remember standing there
clutching the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that
belonged to the passage. It wasn’t till years later that I somehow managed to crash the
gate and get into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at
one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and ran between my feet. It was quite white
with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have
been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your
mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was
only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a dog. Nailer, his
name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him
under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that
moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit
earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place
where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the
wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the
bullfinch in its cage — which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because
the window was always dusty — all these things dropped into place in my mind one by
one, like bits of a jig-saw puzzle.
Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of
geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two
thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire — I keep saying WAS, you notice, though
after all the place still exists — about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a
valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself and the Thames, and higher hills behind.
On top of the hills there were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could
see a great white house with a colonnade. This was Binfield House (‘The Hall’,
everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as Upper Binfield, though there
was no village there and hadn’t been for a hundred years or more. I must have been
nearly seven before I noticed the existence of Binfield House. When you’re very small
you don’t look into the distance. But by that time I knew every inch of the town, which
was shaped roughly like a cross with the market-place in the middle. Our shop was in the
High Street a little before you got to the market-place, and on the corner there was Mrs
Wheeler’s sweet-shop where you spent a halfpenny when you had one. Mother Wheeler
was a dirty old witch and people suspected her of sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting
them back in the bottle, though this was never proved. Farther down there was the
barber’s shop with the advert for Abdulla cigarettes — the one with the Egyptian soldiers
on it, and curiously enough they’re using the same advert to this day — and the rich boozy
smell of bay rum and latakia. Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the
brewery. In the middle of the market-place there was the stone horse-trough, and on top
of the water there was always a fine film of dust and chaff.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come
back to me. If I shut my eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say,
eight, it’s always in summer weather that I remember it. Either it’s the market-place at
dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over everything and the carrier’s horse with
his nose dug well into his nose-bag, munching away, or it’s a hot afternoon in the great
green juicy meadows round the town, or it’s about dusk in the lane behind the allotments,
and there’s a smell of pipe-tobacco and night- stocks floating through the hedge. But in a
sense I do remember different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with
things to eat, which varied at different times of the year. Especially the things you used to
find in the hedges. In July there were dewberries — but they’re very rare — and the
blackberries were getting red enough to eat. In September there were sloes and hazel-
nuts. The best hazelnuts were always out of reach. Later on there were beech-nuts and
crab-apples. Then there were the kind of minor foods that you used to eat when there was
nothing better going. Haws — but they’re not much good — and hips, which have a nice
sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them. Angelica is good in early summer,
especially when you’re thirsty, and so are the stems of various grasses. Then there’s
sorrel, which is good with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock
which has a sour taste. Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when you’re a long
way from home and very hungry.
Joe was two years older than myself. When we were very small Mother used to pay Katie
Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us out for walks in the afternoons. Katie’s father
worked in the brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always on the
lookout for odd jobs. She was only twelve when Joe was seven and I was five, and her
mental level wasn’t very different from ours. She used to drag me by the ann and call me
‘Baby’, and she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run over by
dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation went we were almost on equal
terms. We used to go for long, trailing kind of walks — always, of course, picking and
eating things all the way — down the lane past the allotments, across Roper’s Meadows,
and down to the Mill Fann, where there was a pool with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and
I used to go fishing there when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield
Road so as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town. This shop was in
such a bad position that anyone who took it went bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it
was three times a sweet-shop, once a grocer’s, and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a
peculiar fascination for children. Even when we had no money, we’d go that way so as to
glue our noses against the window. Katie wasn’t in the least above sharing a farthing’s
worth of sweets and quarrelling over her share. You could buy things worth having for a
farthing in those days. Most sweets were four ounces a penny, and there was even some
stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly broken sweets from other bottles, which was six.
Then there were Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn’t be finished
inside half an hour. Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight a penny, and so were liquorice
pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for a large bag, and a prize packet which contained
several different kinds of sweets, a gold ring, and sometimes a whistle, was a penny. You
don’t see prize packets nowadays. A whole lot of the kinds of sweets we had in those
days have gone out. There was a kind of flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them,
and also a kind of sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to eat
it with, which cost a halfpenny. Both of those have disappeared. So have Caraway
Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar matches, and even Hundreds and
Thousands you hardly ever see. Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when
you’d only a farthing. And what about Penny Monsters? Does one ever see a Penny
Monster nowadays? It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart of fizzy lemonade, all
for a penny. That’s another thing that the war killed stone dead.
It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as
myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm
greeny light coming through the hazel boughs. I can see the three of us trailing along,
eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my ann and saying ‘Come on,
Baby! ’ and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe, ‘Joe! You come back ‘ere this minute! You’ll
catch it! ’ Joe was a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves, the
kind of boy who’s always doing something dangerous. At seven he’d already got into
short trousers, with the thick black stockings drawn up over the knee and the great
clumping boots that boys had to wear in those days. I was still in frocks — a kind of
holland overall that Mother used to make for me. Katie used to wear a dreadful ragged
parody of a grown-up dress that descended from sister to sister in her family. She had a
ridiculous great hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled skirt
which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels trodden down. She was a
tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but not bad at ‘minding’ children. In a family like
that a child is ‘minding’ other children about as soon as it’s weaned. At times she’d try to
be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting you short with a proverb, which
to her mind was something unanswerable. If you said ‘Don’t care’, she’d answer
immediately:
‘Don’t care was made to care, Don’t care was hung, Don’t care was put in a pot And
boiled till he was done. ’
Or if you called her names it would be ‘Hard words break no bones’, or, when you’d
been boasting, ‘Pride comes before a fall’. This came very true one day when I was
strutting along pretending to be a soldier and fell into a cowpat. Her family lived in a
filthy little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery. The place
swarmed with children like a kind of vermin. The whole family had managed to dodge
going to school, which was fairly easy to do in those days, and started running errands
and doing other odd jobs as soon as they could walk. One of the elder brothers got a
month for stealing turnips. She stopped taking us out for walks a year later when Joe was
eight and getting too tough for a girl to handle. He’d discovered that in Katie’s home they
slept five in a bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.
Poor Katie! She had her first baby when she was fifteen. No one knew who was the
father, and probably Katie wasn’t too certain herself. Most people believe it was one of
her brothers. The workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in
Walton. Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by the standards of her
family was a come-down. The last time I saw her was in 1913. I was biking through
Walton, and I passed some dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences
round them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at certain times of
the year, when the police would let them. A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smoky face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the
huts and began shaking out a rag mat. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven.
2
Thursday was market day. Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins and dirty smocks
and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying long hazel switches, used to drive
their brutes into the market- place early in the morning. For hours there’d be a terrific
hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen’s vans who wanted to get
through the crush cracking their whips and cursing, and everyone who had anything to do
with the cattle shouting and throwing sticks. The big noise was always when they brought
a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-
abiding brutes that only wanted to get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn’t have
been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn’t had to turn out and chase it. Sometimes
some terrified brute, generally a half-grown heifer, used to break loose and charge down
a side street, and then anyone who happened to be in the way would stand in the middle
of the road and swing his anns backwards like the sails of a windmill, shouting, ‘Woo!
Woo! ’ This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic effect on an animal and certainly it
did frighten them.
Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into the shop and run
samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the
farmers, because he had no delivery van and couldn’t afford to give long credits. Mostly
he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen’s horses
and so forth. Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm, who was a stingy old bastard with a grey
chin-beard, used to stand there for half an hour, fingering samples of chicken corn and
letting them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after which, of course, he
finally used to make off without buying anything. In the evenings the pubs were full of
drunken men. In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it
had some guts in it. All through the Boer War the recruiting sergeant used to be in the
four-ale bar of the George every Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines
and very free with his money. Sometimes next morning you’d see him leading off some
great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who’d taken the shilling when he was too
drunk to see and found in the morning that it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of
it. People used to stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go
past, almost as if it had been a funeral. ‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A
fine young fellow like that! ’ It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was
the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets. Their attitude to the war, and to the
Army, was very curious. They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling.
It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard. Father had a slow sort of mind, he’d never taken to ‘book-learning’, as he called it,
and his English wasn’t good. On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he really took
things easy, he’d settle down by the parlour fireplace to have what he called a ‘good read’
at the Sunday paper. His favourite paper was The People — Mother preferred the News of
the World, which she considered had more murders in it. I can see them now. A Sunday
afternoon — summer, of course, always summer — a smell of roast pork and greens still
floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest
murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in
slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through the yards of smudgy print. And
the soft feeling of summer all round you, the geranium in the window, a starling cooing
somewhere, and myself under the table with the B. O. P. , making believe that the
tablecloth is a tent. Afterwards, at tea, as he chewed his way through the radishes and
spring onions, Father would talk in a ruminative kind of way about the stuff he’d been
reading, the fires and shipwrecks and scandals in high society, and these here new flying
machines and the chap (I notice that to this day he turns up in the Sunday papers about
once in three years) who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three
days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice. Father was always a bit
sceptical of this story, and of the new flying machines, otherwise he believed everything
he read. Until 1909 no one in Fower Binfield believed that human beings would ever
learn to fly. The official doctrine was that if God had meant us to fly He’d have given us
wings. Uncle Ezekiel couldn’t help retorting that if God had meant us to ride He’d have
given us wheels, but even he didn’t believe in the new flying machines.
It was only on Sunday afternoons, and perhaps on the one evening a week when he
looked in at the George for a half-pint, that Father turned his mind to such things. At
other times he was always more or less overwhelmed by business. There wasn’t really
such a lot to do, but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the yard,
struggling about with sacks and bales, or in the kind of dusty little cubby-hole behind the
counter in the shop, adding figures up in a notebook with a stump of pencil. He was a
very honest man and a very obliging man, very anxious to provide good stuff and swindle
nobody, which even in those days wasn’t the best way to get on in business. He would
have been just the man for some small official job, a postmaster, for instance, or station-
master of a country station. But he hadn’t either the cheek and enterprise to borrow
money and expand the business, or the imagination to think of new selling-lines. It was
characteristic of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the invention of
a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling’s Mixture it was called, and it was famous
over a radius of nearly five miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel was a
bit of a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little shop. It was his
theory that cage-birds lose their colour because of lack of variation in their diet. In the
yard behind the shop Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about
twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them and mix their seeds
with ordinary canary seed. Jackie, the bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was
supposed to be an advertisement for Bowling’s Mixture. Certainly, unlike most
bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.
Mother was fat ever since I remember her. No doubt it’s from her that I inherit my
pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that makes you get fat.
She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good deal fairer than his and
a tendency to wear black dresses. But except on Sundays I never remember her without
an apron. It would be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never
remember her when she wasn’t cooking. When you look back over a long period you
seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic
attitude. It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing. Well, just as
when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter, with his hair all
mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil which he moistens between his lips, and
just as I remember Uncle Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself
out and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I remember her at the
kitchen table, with her forearms covered with flour, rolling out a lump of dough.
You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days. A huge place, rather dark and
low, with a great beam across the ceiling and a stone floor and cellars underneath.
Everything enormous, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. A vast stone sink which
didn’t have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and going right up to the
ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a ton a month and took God knows how long
to blacklead. Mother at the table rolling out a huge flap of dough. And myself crawling
round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and tin beetle-traps (we
had them in all the dark corners and they used to be baited with beer) and now and again
coming up to the table to try and cadge a bit of food. Mother ‘didn’t hold with’ eating
between meals. You generally got the same answer: ‘Get along with you, now! I’m not
going to have you spoiling your dinner. Your eye’s bigger than your belly. ’ Very
occasionally, however, she’d cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.
I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There’s always a fascination in watching
anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman — a woman who really
knows how to cook, I mean — rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a
satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of
course, that’s exactly what she is. Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were
generally mottled with flour. When she was cooking, all her movements were
wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins did
exactly what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in
a world where she belonged, among things she really understood. Except through the
Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world didn’t really exist for
her. Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as
well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realized this even by the time I was
ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of
England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could
have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know
such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise
polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs
mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d
heard of it. I can almost hear her voice — ‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that!
The IDEA! ’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her
life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.
Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the
loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her
serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and
until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat
and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and
even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s
work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d
have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a
button for himself.
So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything
goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It
was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the
table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All
through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it
vaguely wicked — sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic — to keep later hours.
Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she
would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was
her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals
were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals — boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef
and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog, and jam
roly-poly — with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held
good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to
bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you
made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or
‘answered back’. In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two
Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the
child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from
the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories,
which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give
him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was
too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing
anything with him.
At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day
long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of his son if he
caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these
thrashings actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great
lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that
you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings
never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests, and learned to
smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be
treated rough. Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway.
According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming
was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging
on behind carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All animals were
dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its
special recognized methods of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs
got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you, and
snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny
encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung. All insects stung, except
flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals,
were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were
mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you
colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin- rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of
cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you
washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in
the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway.
Cowcake was poisonous, and so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and
Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for
you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that
Mother always allowed. When she was making plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy
stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were
sick. Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or poisonous, there
were certain things that had mysterious virtues. Raw onions were a cure for almost
everything. A stocking tied round your neck was a cure for a sore throat. Sulphur in a
dog’s drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer’s bowl behind the back door always
had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there year after year, never dissolving.
We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and
between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and ‘read her paper’, as she
called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The
week-day papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a
murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind
whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d
hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr Palmer and Mrs Manning. I think
Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfleld chiefly as a place where murders
were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said,
she just didn’t know how people could BE so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats,
burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone
could DO such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when
Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the
shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out,
most of the shops in the High Street didn’t have them, but Mother felt safe behind them.
All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower
Binfield. The Crippen case — but that was years later, when I was almost grown up —
upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. ‘Gutting his poor wife up and burying her in
the coal cellar! The IDEA! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him! ’ And curiously
enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who
dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and
chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her
eyes.
But what she mostly read on week-days was Hilda’s Home Companion. In those days it
was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, and as a matter of fact it still
exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that
have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but
less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six
months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same
Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing-machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s
chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to
look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader
and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda’s Home Companion. Sitting in
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did.
Egyptian statues that I’d seen pictures of in the penny encyclopedia, enormous stone
statues thirty feet high, sitting on their thrones opposite one another, with their hands on
their knees and a faint mysterious smile on their faces.
How it came back to me! That peculiar feeling — it was only a feeling, you couldn’t
describe it as an activity — that we used to call ‘Church’. The sweet corpsy smell, the
rustle of Sunday dresses, the wheeze of the organ and the roaring voices, the spot of light
from the hole in the window creeping slowly up the nave. In some way the grown-ups
could put it across that this extraordinary performance was necessary. You took it for
granted, just as you took the Bible, which you got in big doses in those days. There were
texts on every wall and you knew whole chapters of the O. T. by heart. Even now my
head’s stuffed full of bits out of the Bible. And the children of Israel did evil again in the
sight of the Lord. And Asher abode in his breeches. Followed them from Dan until thou
come unto Beersheba. Smote him under the fifth rib, so that he died. You never
understood it, you didn’t try to or want to, it was just a kind of medicine, a queer-tasting
stuff that you had to swallow and knew to be in some way necessary. An extraordinary
rigmarole about people with names like Shimei and Nebuchadnezzar and Ahithophel and
Hashbadada; people with long stiff garments and Assyrian beards, riding up and down on
camels among temples and cedar trees and doing extraordinary things. Sacrificing burnt
offerings, walking about in fiery furnaces, getting nailed on crosses, getting swallowed
by whales. And all mixed up with the sweet graveyard smell and the serge dresses and
the wheeze of the organ.
That was the world I went back to when I saw the poster about King Zog. For a moment I
didn’t merely remember it, I was IN it. Of course such impressions don’t last more than a
few seconds. A moment later it was as though I’d opened my eyes again, and I was forty-
five and there was a traffic jam in the Strand. But it had left a kind of after-effect behind.
Sometimes when you come out of a train of thought you feel as if you were coming up
from deep water, but this time it was the other way about, it was as though it was back in
1900 that I’d been breathing real air. Even now, with my eyes open, so to speak, all those
bloody fools hustling to and fro, and the posters and the petrol-stink and the roar of the
engines, seemed to me less real than Sunday morning in Lower Binfield thirty-eight years
ago.
I chucked away my cigar and walked on slowly. I could smell the corpse-smell. In a
manner of speaking I can smell it now. I’m back in Lower Binfield, and the year’s 1900.
Beside the horse- trough in the market-place the carrier’s horse is having its nose- bag. At
the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha’porth of brandy balls.
Lady Rampling’s carriage is driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed
breeches with his arms folded. Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe Chamberlain. The recruiting-
sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight blue overalls, and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down
twisting his moustache. The drunks are puking in the yard behind the George. Vicky’s at
Windsor, God’s in heaven, Christ’s on the cross, Jonah’s in the whale, Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og
the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another — not doing
anything exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed place, like a couple of fire-dogs,
or the Lion and the Unicorn.
Is it gone for ever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong
to it. So do you.
PART II
1
The world I momentarily remembered when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster was so
different from the world I live in now that you might have a bit of difficulty in believing I
ever belonged to it.
I suppose by this time you’ve got a kind of picture of me in your mind — a fat middle-
aged bloke with false teeth and a red face — and subconsciously you’ve been imagining
that I was just the same even when I was in my cradle. But forty-five years is a long time,
and though some people don’t change and develop, others do. I’ve changed a great deal,
and I’ve had my ups and downs, mostly ups. It may seem queer, but my father would
probably be rather proud of me if he could see me now. He’d think it a wonderful thing
that a son of his should own a motor-car and live in a house with a bathroom. Even now
I’m a little above my origin, and at other times I’ve touched levels that we should never
have dreamed of in those old days before the war.
Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the
answer will be ‘Which war? ’ In my case the never-never land that people are thinking of
when they say ‘before the war’ might almost be before the Boer War. I was born in ‘93,
and I can actually remember the outbreak of the Boer War, because of the first-class row
that Father and Uncle Ezekiel had about it. I’ve several other memories that would date
from about a year earlier than that.
The very first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin chaff. You went up the stone
passage that led from the kitchen to the shop, and the smell of sainfoin got stronger all the
way. Mother had fixed a wooden gate in the doorway to prevent Joe and myself (Joe was
my elder brother) from getting into the shop. I can still remember standing there
clutching the bars, and the smell of sainfoin mixed up with the damp plastery smell that
belonged to the passage. It wasn’t till years later that I somehow managed to crash the
gate and get into the shop when nobody was there. A mouse that had been having a go at
one of the meal-bins suddenly plopped out and ran between my feet. It was quite white
with meal. This must have happened when I was about six.
When you’re very young you seem to suddenly become conscious of things that have
been under your nose for a long time past. The things round about you swim into your
mind one at a time, rather as they do when you’re waking from sleep. For instance, it was
only when I was nearly four that I suddenly realized that we owned a dog. Nailer, his
name was, an old white English terrier of the breed that’s gone out nowadays. I met him
under the kitchen table and in some way seemed to grasp, having only learnt it that
moment, that he belonged to us and that his name was Nailer. In the same way, a bit
earlier, I’d discovered that beyond the gate at the end of the passage there was a place
where the smell of sainfoin came from. And the shop itself, with the huge scales and the
wooden measures and the tin shovel, and the white lettering on the window, and the
bullfinch in its cage — which you couldn’t see very well even from the pavement, because
the window was always dusty — all these things dropped into place in my mind one by
one, like bits of a jig-saw puzzle.
Time goes on, you get stronger on your legs, and by degrees you begin to get a grasp of
geography. I suppose Lower Binfield was just like any other market town of about two
thousand inhabitants. It was in Oxfordshire — I keep saying WAS, you notice, though
after all the place still exists — about five miles from the Thames. It lay in a bit of a
valley, with a low ripple of hills between itself and the Thames, and higher hills behind.
On top of the hills there were woods in sort of dim blue masses among which you could
see a great white house with a colonnade. This was Binfield House (‘The Hall’,
everybody called it), and the top of the hill was known as Upper Binfield, though there
was no village there and hadn’t been for a hundred years or more. I must have been
nearly seven before I noticed the existence of Binfield House. When you’re very small
you don’t look into the distance. But by that time I knew every inch of the town, which
was shaped roughly like a cross with the market-place in the middle. Our shop was in the
High Street a little before you got to the market-place, and on the corner there was Mrs
Wheeler’s sweet-shop where you spent a halfpenny when you had one. Mother Wheeler
was a dirty old witch and people suspected her of sucking the bull’s-eyes and putting
them back in the bottle, though this was never proved. Farther down there was the
barber’s shop with the advert for Abdulla cigarettes — the one with the Egyptian soldiers
on it, and curiously enough they’re using the same advert to this day — and the rich boozy
smell of bay rum and latakia. Behind the houses you could see the chimneys of the
brewery. In the middle of the market-place there was the stone horse-trough, and on top
of the water there was always a fine film of dust and chaff.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
I’m quite aware that that’s a delusion. I’m merely trying to tell you how things come
back to me. If I shut my eyes and think of Lower Binfield any time before I was, say,
eight, it’s always in summer weather that I remember it. Either it’s the market-place at
dinner-time, with a sort of sleepy dusty hush over everything and the carrier’s horse with
his nose dug well into his nose-bag, munching away, or it’s a hot afternoon in the great
green juicy meadows round the town, or it’s about dusk in the lane behind the allotments,
and there’s a smell of pipe-tobacco and night- stocks floating through the hedge. But in a
sense I do remember different seasons, because all my memories are bound up with
things to eat, which varied at different times of the year. Especially the things you used to
find in the hedges. In July there were dewberries — but they’re very rare — and the
blackberries were getting red enough to eat. In September there were sloes and hazel-
nuts. The best hazelnuts were always out of reach. Later on there were beech-nuts and
crab-apples. Then there were the kind of minor foods that you used to eat when there was
nothing better going. Haws — but they’re not much good — and hips, which have a nice
sharp taste if you clean the hairs out of them. Angelica is good in early summer,
especially when you’re thirsty, and so are the stems of various grasses. Then there’s
sorrel, which is good with bread and butter, and pig-nuts, and a kind of wood shamrock
which has a sour taste. Even plantain seeds are better than nothing when you’re a long
way from home and very hungry.
Joe was two years older than myself. When we were very small Mother used to pay Katie
Simmons eighteen pence a week to take us out for walks in the afternoons. Katie’s father
worked in the brewery and had fourteen children, so that the family were always on the
lookout for odd jobs. She was only twelve when Joe was seven and I was five, and her
mental level wasn’t very different from ours. She used to drag me by the ann and call me
‘Baby’, and she had just enough authority over us to prevent us from being run over by
dogcarts or chased by bulls, but so far as conversation went we were almost on equal
terms. We used to go for long, trailing kind of walks — always, of course, picking and
eating things all the way — down the lane past the allotments, across Roper’s Meadows,
and down to the Mill Fann, where there was a pool with newts and tiny carp in it (Joe and
I used to go fishing there when we were a bit older), and back by the Upper Binfield
Road so as to pass the sweet-shop that stood on the edge of the town. This shop was in
such a bad position that anyone who took it went bankrupt, and to my own knowledge it
was three times a sweet-shop, once a grocer’s, and once a bicycle-repair shop, but it had a
peculiar fascination for children. Even when we had no money, we’d go that way so as to
glue our noses against the window. Katie wasn’t in the least above sharing a farthing’s
worth of sweets and quarrelling over her share. You could buy things worth having for a
farthing in those days. Most sweets were four ounces a penny, and there was even some
stuff called Paradise Mixture, mostly broken sweets from other bottles, which was six.
Then there were Farthing Everlastings, which were a yard long and couldn’t be finished
inside half an hour. Sugar mice and sugar pigs were eight a penny, and so were liquorice
pistols, popcorn was a halfpenny for a large bag, and a prize packet which contained
several different kinds of sweets, a gold ring, and sometimes a whistle, was a penny. You
don’t see prize packets nowadays. A whole lot of the kinds of sweets we had in those
days have gone out. There was a kind of flat white sweet with mottoes printed on them,
and also a kind of sticky pink stuff in an oval matchwood box with a tiny tin spoon to eat
it with, which cost a halfpenny. Both of those have disappeared. So have Caraway
Comfits, and so have chocolate pipes and sugar matches, and even Hundreds and
Thousands you hardly ever see. Hundreds and Thousands were a great standby when
you’d only a farthing. And what about Penny Monsters? Does one ever see a Penny
Monster nowadays? It was a huge bottle, holding more than a quart of fizzy lemonade, all
for a penny. That’s another thing that the war killed stone dead.
It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as
myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm
greeny light coming through the hazel boughs. I can see the three of us trailing along,
eating stuff out of the hedge, with Katie dragging at my ann and saying ‘Come on,
Baby! ’ and sometimes yelling ahead to Joe, ‘Joe! You come back ‘ere this minute! You’ll
catch it! ’ Joe was a hefty boy with a big, lumpy sort of head and tremendous calves, the
kind of boy who’s always doing something dangerous. At seven he’d already got into
short trousers, with the thick black stockings drawn up over the knee and the great
clumping boots that boys had to wear in those days. I was still in frocks — a kind of
holland overall that Mother used to make for me. Katie used to wear a dreadful ragged
parody of a grown-up dress that descended from sister to sister in her family. She had a
ridiculous great hat with her pigtails hanging down behind it, and a long, draggled skirt
which trailed on the ground, and button boots with the heels trodden down. She was a
tiny thing, not much taller than Joe, but not bad at ‘minding’ children. In a family like
that a child is ‘minding’ other children about as soon as it’s weaned. At times she’d try to
be grown-up and ladylike, and she had a way of cutting you short with a proverb, which
to her mind was something unanswerable. If you said ‘Don’t care’, she’d answer
immediately:
‘Don’t care was made to care, Don’t care was hung, Don’t care was put in a pot And
boiled till he was done. ’
Or if you called her names it would be ‘Hard words break no bones’, or, when you’d
been boasting, ‘Pride comes before a fall’. This came very true one day when I was
strutting along pretending to be a soldier and fell into a cowpat. Her family lived in a
filthy little rat-hole of a place in the slummy street behind the brewery. The place
swarmed with children like a kind of vermin. The whole family had managed to dodge
going to school, which was fairly easy to do in those days, and started running errands
and doing other odd jobs as soon as they could walk. One of the elder brothers got a
month for stealing turnips. She stopped taking us out for walks a year later when Joe was
eight and getting too tough for a girl to handle. He’d discovered that in Katie’s home they
slept five in a bed, and used to tease the life out of her about it.
Poor Katie! She had her first baby when she was fifteen. No one knew who was the
father, and probably Katie wasn’t too certain herself. Most people believe it was one of
her brothers. The workhouse people took the baby, and Katie went into service in
Walton. Some time afterwards she married a tinker, which even by the standards of her
family was a come-down. The last time I saw her was in 1913. I was biking through
Walton, and I passed some dreadful wooden shacks beside the railway line, with fences
round them made out of barrel-staves, where the gypsies used to camp at certain times of
the year, when the police would let them. A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smoky face, looking at least fifty years old, came out of one of the
huts and began shaking out a rag mat. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven.
2
Thursday was market day. Chaps with round red faces like pumpkins and dirty smocks
and huge boots covered with dry cow-dung, carrying long hazel switches, used to drive
their brutes into the market- place early in the morning. For hours there’d be a terrific
hullabaloo: dogs barking, pigs squealing, chaps in tradesmen’s vans who wanted to get
through the crush cracking their whips and cursing, and everyone who had anything to do
with the cattle shouting and throwing sticks. The big noise was always when they brought
a bull to market. Even at that age it struck me that most of the bulls were harmless law-
abiding brutes that only wanted to get to their stalls in peace, but a bull wouldn’t have
been regarded as a bull if half the town hadn’t had to turn out and chase it. Sometimes
some terrified brute, generally a half-grown heifer, used to break loose and charge down
a side street, and then anyone who happened to be in the way would stand in the middle
of the road and swing his anns backwards like the sails of a windmill, shouting, ‘Woo!
Woo! ’ This was supposed to have a kind of hypnotic effect on an animal and certainly it
did frighten them.
Half-way through the morning some of the farmers would come into the shop and run
samples of seed through their fingers. Actually Father did very little business with the
farmers, because he had no delivery van and couldn’t afford to give long credits. Mostly
he did a rather petty class of business, poultry food and fodder for the tradesmen’s horses
and so forth. Old Brewer, of the Mill Farm, who was a stingy old bastard with a grey
chin-beard, used to stand there for half an hour, fingering samples of chicken corn and
letting them drop into his pocket in an absent-minded manner, after which, of course, he
finally used to make off without buying anything. In the evenings the pubs were full of
drunken men. In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it
had some guts in it. All through the Boer War the recruiting sergeant used to be in the
four-ale bar of the George every Thursday and Saturday night, dressed up to the nines
and very free with his money. Sometimes next morning you’d see him leading off some
great sheepish, red-faced lump of a farm lad who’d taken the shilling when he was too
drunk to see and found in the morning that it would cost him twenty pounds to get out of
it. People used to stand in their doorways and shake their heads when they saw them go
past, almost as if it had been a funeral. ‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A
fine young fellow like that! ’ It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was
the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets. Their attitude to the war, and to the
Army, was very curious. They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling.
It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard. Father had a slow sort of mind, he’d never taken to ‘book-learning’, as he called it,
and his English wasn’t good. On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he really took
things easy, he’d settle down by the parlour fireplace to have what he called a ‘good read’
at the Sunday paper. His favourite paper was The People — Mother preferred the News of
the World, which she considered had more murders in it. I can see them now. A Sunday
afternoon — summer, of course, always summer — a smell of roast pork and greens still
floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest
murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in
slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through the yards of smudgy print. And
the soft feeling of summer all round you, the geranium in the window, a starling cooing
somewhere, and myself under the table with the B. O. P. , making believe that the
tablecloth is a tent. Afterwards, at tea, as he chewed his way through the radishes and
spring onions, Father would talk in a ruminative kind of way about the stuff he’d been
reading, the fires and shipwrecks and scandals in high society, and these here new flying
machines and the chap (I notice that to this day he turns up in the Sunday papers about
once in three years) who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three
days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice. Father was always a bit
sceptical of this story, and of the new flying machines, otherwise he believed everything
he read. Until 1909 no one in Fower Binfield believed that human beings would ever
learn to fly. The official doctrine was that if God had meant us to fly He’d have given us
wings. Uncle Ezekiel couldn’t help retorting that if God had meant us to ride He’d have
given us wheels, but even he didn’t believe in the new flying machines.
It was only on Sunday afternoons, and perhaps on the one evening a week when he
looked in at the George for a half-pint, that Father turned his mind to such things. At
other times he was always more or less overwhelmed by business. There wasn’t really
such a lot to do, but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the yard,
struggling about with sacks and bales, or in the kind of dusty little cubby-hole behind the
counter in the shop, adding figures up in a notebook with a stump of pencil. He was a
very honest man and a very obliging man, very anxious to provide good stuff and swindle
nobody, which even in those days wasn’t the best way to get on in business. He would
have been just the man for some small official job, a postmaster, for instance, or station-
master of a country station. But he hadn’t either the cheek and enterprise to borrow
money and expand the business, or the imagination to think of new selling-lines. It was
characteristic of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the invention of
a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling’s Mixture it was called, and it was famous
over a radius of nearly five miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel was a
bit of a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little shop. It was his
theory that cage-birds lose their colour because of lack of variation in their diet. In the
yard behind the shop Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about
twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them and mix their seeds
with ordinary canary seed. Jackie, the bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was
supposed to be an advertisement for Bowling’s Mixture. Certainly, unlike most
bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.
Mother was fat ever since I remember her. No doubt it’s from her that I inherit my
pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that makes you get fat.
She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good deal fairer than his and
a tendency to wear black dresses. But except on Sundays I never remember her without
an apron. It would be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never
remember her when she wasn’t cooking. When you look back over a long period you
seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic
attitude. It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing. Well, just as
when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter, with his hair all
mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil which he moistens between his lips, and
just as I remember Uncle Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself
out and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I remember her at the
kitchen table, with her forearms covered with flour, rolling out a lump of dough.
You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days. A huge place, rather dark and
low, with a great beam across the ceiling and a stone floor and cellars underneath.
Everything enormous, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. A vast stone sink which
didn’t have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and going right up to the
ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a ton a month and took God knows how long
to blacklead. Mother at the table rolling out a huge flap of dough. And myself crawling
round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and tin beetle-traps (we
had them in all the dark corners and they used to be baited with beer) and now and again
coming up to the table to try and cadge a bit of food. Mother ‘didn’t hold with’ eating
between meals. You generally got the same answer: ‘Get along with you, now! I’m not
going to have you spoiling your dinner. Your eye’s bigger than your belly. ’ Very
occasionally, however, she’d cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.
I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There’s always a fascination in watching
anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman — a woman who really
knows how to cook, I mean — rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a
satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of
course, that’s exactly what she is. Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were
generally mottled with flour. When she was cooking, all her movements were
wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins did
exactly what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in
a world where she belonged, among things she really understood. Except through the
Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world didn’t really exist for
her. Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as
well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realized this even by the time I was
ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of
England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could
have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know
such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise
polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs
mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d
heard of it. I can almost hear her voice — ‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that!
The IDEA! ’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her
life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.
Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the
loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her
serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and
until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat
and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and
even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s
work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d
have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a
button for himself.
So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything
goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It
was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the
table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All
through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it
vaguely wicked — sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic — to keep later hours.
Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she
would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was
her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals
were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals — boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef
and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog, and jam
roly-poly — with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held
good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to
bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you
made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or
‘answered back’. In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two
Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the
child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from
the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories,
which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give
him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was
too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing
anything with him.
At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day
long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of his son if he
caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these
thrashings actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great
lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that
you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings
never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests, and learned to
smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be
treated rough. Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway.
According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming
was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging
on behind carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All animals were
dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its
special recognized methods of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs
got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you, and
snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny
encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung. All insects stung, except
flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals,
were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were
mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you
colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin- rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of
cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you
washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in
the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway.
Cowcake was poisonous, and so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and
Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for
you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that
Mother always allowed. When she was making plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy
stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were
sick. Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or poisonous, there
were certain things that had mysterious virtues. Raw onions were a cure for almost
everything. A stocking tied round your neck was a cure for a sore throat. Sulphur in a
dog’s drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer’s bowl behind the back door always
had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there year after year, never dissolving.
We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and
between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and ‘read her paper’, as she
called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The
week-day papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a
murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind
whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d
hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr Palmer and Mrs Manning. I think
Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfleld chiefly as a place where murders
were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said,
she just didn’t know how people could BE so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats,
burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone
could DO such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when
Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the
shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out,
most of the shops in the High Street didn’t have them, but Mother felt safe behind them.
All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower
Binfield. The Crippen case — but that was years later, when I was almost grown up —
upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. ‘Gutting his poor wife up and burying her in
the coal cellar! The IDEA! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him! ’ And curiously
enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who
dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and
chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her
eyes.
But what she mostly read on week-days was Hilda’s Home Companion. In those days it
was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, and as a matter of fact it still
exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that
have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but
less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six
months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same
Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing-machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s
chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to
look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader
and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda’s Home Companion. Sitting in
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did.
