CONTENTS
I. INFANCY . . .
II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS . . .
III. HOLIDAYS . . .
IV. BOOKS AND SCHOOL FRIENDS . . .
V. SCHOOL GAMES AND EARLY READING . . .
VI. PLAYFELLOWS AND SWINDON EXPERIENCES . . .
VII. ANOTHER NEW SCHOOL . . .
VIII. BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND PIGEONS . . .
IX. A LASTING ACQUAINTANCE RICHARD JEFFERIES . . .
X. PUBLIC SCHOOL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS . . .
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I. INFANCY
When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands, and I have heard the voice of one singing as I sat or lay in her arms; and I have become again aware very dimly of being enclosed in rooms that were shadowy, whether by comparison with outer sunlight I know not. The songs, first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on this side of it also. I was, I should think, a very still listener whom the music flowed through and filled to the exclusion of all thought and of all sensation except of blissful easy fullness, so that too early or too sudden ceasing would have meant pangs of expectant emptiness.
The one song which, by reason of its repetition or
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of some aptitude in me, I well remember, was one combining fondness with tranquil if peevish retrospective and regret in a soft heavy twilight. I reach back to it in that effort through a thousand twilights lineally descended from that first one and from the night which gave it birth. If I cried or suffered pain or deprivation in those years nothing remains to star the darkness. Either I asked no question or I had none but sweet answers. I was at peace with life.
Indoors, out of the sun, I seem never to have been troubled by heat or cold strong enough to be remembered.
But out of doors, somewhere at the verge of the dark years, I can recall more simply and completely than any spent indoors at that time one day above others. I lay in the tall grass and buttercups of a narrow field at the edge of London and saw the sky and nothing but the sky. There was some one near, probably a servant, necessary but utterly insignificant. I was alone and happy to be so, just as indoors I was happy among people and shadows between walls. Was it one day or many? I know of no beginning or end to it; but an end I suppose it had an age past.
Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school. There were some boys and more girls whom I desired and sometimes struggled to sit next; and at least two whom I avoided. One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of "Lizzie’; the
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other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull.
Of the mistresses I can see a tallish one, with pink complexion, high cheekbones and sleek light brown hair, whose home was a confectioner’s shop, so that it happened that she gave away sweets for slight merits; one dark and shorter, more likeable and hateable; and a stout, short, bustling head mistress in whom I never knew of anything but her appearance to prove her common humanity with the children and other teachers.
I learnt easily: perhaps my memory would record the sweets I earned but not the punishments, nor yet the morning and afternoon labours, whether well or ill performed, of five days in the week.
I had no elder brother, and the younger ones of three and one were not yet old enough to accompany me; if I had any friend with whom I walked or trotted home, embraced and embracing as I see children now, I have forgotten. Not that I was lonely, but that I was stung with no intense delight by company, nor with pain by lack of it.
I knew boys and girls in several of the streets parallel to ours or crossing it. One or more of them was with me when I found myself somehow on the forbidden side of a black fence which divided the back gardens of one street from a meadow and cut short another street; there were trees and cows in the meadow, and a small pond not far from the fence.
With one of these friends, a girl, I went home once and in her back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias and
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smelt bitter crushed stalks in plucking them. As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless.
[Tottie Armour . . . ; ]
Why some children, whether my equals or old enough to protect me, were pleasant, and how, I cannot say. Their faces are invisible to me all except one: I can say only that some were fat and the eyes narrow, and that some girls had dark hair, others fair. The one that I can see has black curly hair, dark eyes and cherry lips; and she is smiling: her name was Tottie Armour. We picked sorrel leaves and ate them among the gorse bushes on Wandsworth Common.
A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were "hills" to us, who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them.
Equal to them in height and steepness, and almost equal as playing grounds, were the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street, one winter.
I remember the look of many of the streets, but as not a year has since gone by without my seeing them it is probably not their very early look, save in perhaps a few cases.
The first was when I stood by the beerhouse at the bottom of one of them and watched what was happening fifty
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yards up in the roadway. A mad dog had run into one of the narrow front gardens and lay just inside the railings; a man on the other side with a pickaxe was about to kill the dog; and a small crowd had collected in the roadway. I do not know that I saw the blow struck, but the idea of sharp heavy steel piercing the shaggy hair, flesh and bone of a living creature has remained horrible and ineffaceable every since.
Another street which I seem to recall as it was then and as it soon afterwards ceased to be was one leading to Clapham Junction Station. It consists of a low inn with a red painted board up and a row of old dark small cottages mostly with longish front gardens and low wooden fences and a rustic outmoded look inspiring a sort of curiosity and liking as well as some pity or contempt.
If I cannot call up images of most of the streets as they were then, because I have witnessed the gradual development since, perhaps the reason is the same for my being unable to call up images of my father and mother or of my brothers. No. I have only one clear early glimpse of my father — darting out of the house in his slippers and chasing and catching a big boy who had bullied me. He was eloquent, confident, black-haired, brown-eyed, all that my mother was not. By glimpses, I learnt with awe and astonishment that he had once been of my age. He knew, for example, far more about marbles than the best players at school. His talk of "alley-taws" — above all the way his thumb drove the
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marble out of the crook of his first finger, the speeding sureness of it — these betokened mastery.
Once or twice I spent an hour or so in his office in an old government building. The presence of a wash-stand in a sitting-room pleased me, but what pleased me still more was the peculiar large brown carraway biscuit which I never got anywhere else. My father at this time gave or was to have given lessons to Lady Somebody, and he mentioned her to me once when we were together in his office. She became connected somehow with the carraway biscuit. With or without her aid, this rarity had a kind of magic and beauty as of a flower or bird only to be found in one wood in all the world.
I can hear but never see him telling me for the tenth or hundredth time the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers hanging in a chain over a bridge to fetch the moon out, which they had mistaken for a green cheese, and the topmost one, whose hold on the parapet began slipping, crying out, "Hold tight below while I spit on my hands," and many another comic tale or rhyme.
[Moonraker: a person who comes from Wiltshire, especially a smuggler.]
My mother I can hardly see save as she is now while I am writing. I cannot see her but I can summon up her presence. She is plainest to me not quite dressed, in white bodice and petticoat, her arms and shoulders rounded and creamy smooth. My affection for her was leavened with lesser likings and with admiration. I liked the scent of her fresh warm skin and supposed it unique. Her straight nose and chin made a profile that for years formed my standard. No
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hair was so beautiful to me as hers was, light golden brown hair, long and rippling. Her singing at fall of night, especially if we were alone together, soothed and fascinated me, as though it had been divine, at once the mightiest and the softest sound in the world. Usually perhaps there was a servant, but my mother did everything for us in the house, made many of our clothes and mended them, prepared and gave us food, tended us when sick, comforted us when cold, disappointed, or sorrowful.
The one terrible thing I witnessed as a small child was my mother suddenly rising from the dining-table with face tortured and crying, "I am going to die." My father took her on his knee and soothed her. I had and have no idea what was the matter.
For her younger sister I felt a similar affection and admiration, though less, and far less often exercised, for her visits were neither long nor frequent. The grace, smoothness and gentleness of her voice and movements gave me pleasure. My first conscious liking for the female body was at sight of her sitting less than half dressed in a chair, her head bent and one foot on to which she was pulling a stocking lifted from the floor.
Years afterwards I used to think of this from time to time to envy the privilege of early childhood. She sang livelier songs, e g from Patience, than my mother ever did. But she did not know our ways and her complaints or corrections were harsh by comparison with my mother's.
Not long after I began to attend school I went away
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alone with my mother for a long holiday. We spent a week here and a week there in different friends' houses. We stayed at Much Birch Vicarage in Herefordshire. It had a shrubbery, a carriage gate. I ate custard out of a custard glass; once I agreed to have a second helping of something if I could have a clean plate, and this made people laugh and look at one another . . . .
In a house, probably at Newport, Monmouthshire, that had a tower or was higher than its neighbours, and in a very light many-windowed room, I sat among grownup people and asked for mustard with my mutton . . . . I walked up a steep street in Newport, looking at the houses on the right-hand side and thinking of a school-friend of my mother's, named Lucy, whom I had never seen . . . .
At Newport also I saw the dark damp-looking oldish house on a hill, with trees and iron railings round it, where my mother as an orphan lived unhappily for many years with two maiden aunts.
Then I went to Caerleon upon Usk to see another and blameless great-aunt named Margaret. I see small houses and gardens on one side and the Usk on the other between steep banks. An idiot passes with boys following him. My aunt's house was the last, as if you could go no farther on account of a bend in the river. There were beautiful great rosy apples in the garden, and a well with a broad stone over it, and ivy and snails on the narrow paths. Then for the first time I thoroughly understood what wells, apples, and snails were. Indoors there were more
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great apples: it was not always possible to finish what was so happily begun. A smoked salmon hung up in a whitewashed kitchen or pantry, and I think I should know the taste again if I could ever meet anything so delicious, but I no longer expect to find it under the name of smoked salmon.
There also I first learnt what a river was, having previously seen nothing better than the Thames, almost as broad as it was long at Westminster. The Usk was not too broad; it was winding; I heard the sound and felt the flood of it. Also I was told that a certain islet or peninsula or level meadow half encircled by the water was the site of King Arthur's Round Table. Either ideas suggested by "King Arthur" and "Round Table" even then vibrated in my brain or they remained there until, a very short time afterwards, they did so undoubtedly when united with the stories of love and battle in The Adventures of King Arthur and his Round Table.
One day, moreover, a porpoise came up the river, and men rowed a small boat hither-thither, and shouted and lifted up their oars and struck heavy blows on the water, not (I think) on the porpoise. And in memory I see all together the riverside street old and rustic and an idiot coming up it, the Usk and the men hunting the porpoise in the bend round King Arthur's Round Table. Away from the river rose a green hill and a stone farmyard wall athwart its slope and I saw black pigs hustling through the gateway at the end of the wall. My mother was with me.
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Afterwards we had some days at Swansea with a great-aunt Mary and I saw the sea and the Gower cliffs and rocks. I collected shells and pebbles that took my fancy, especially one rounded one like a Bath bun which we took back to the garden at Swansea, where it remained for twenty years and more. I have loved flat or round seaworn pebbles ever since, and can never carry away as many as I wish from a new coast or hillside where I am walking.
This holiday gave me the most definite and most pleasant of my very early memories, together with some less definite ideas associated with Caerleon and Wales which afterwards increased, I might almost say magically, by the aid of things heard in home talk or read in books, and of a visit several years later. Until that visit I can discern no landmarks.
My waking life was divided between home, school and the streets and neighbouring common. Glimpses of the outer world I had few. But I remember General Gordon's death at Khartoum, and, whether from a picture in a newspaper or from imagination, I retain an image of a soldier in a fez and armed with a revolver standing with his back to a portico, facing the enemies who swarmed up the steps below and being struck at by one from the side.
[Add pic. of General Gordon.]
Our street like three or four others parallel to it was in two halves, running straight up the opposite sides of a slight valley, along the bottom of which ran the principal
["Three or four others parallel" - as there were at this time. These were — Later there would be far more?]
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street of mixed shops and private houses.
Our house was low down in the half which ran up westwards to Bolingbroke Grove, the eastern boundary of Wandsworth Common. These little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses in unbroken lines on both sides of the street had each, even then when they were new, something distinguishing them and preventing monotony. The people in them made them different. In addition, some were beginning to be draped in creepers. Some gates stood open, some were shut. One had bushes in the garden, another had flowers, another nothing but dark trodden gravel.
The house above ours, in the next pair, was presumably meant for a doctor, and possessed a coach house which looked almost as if it belonged to us. That was our outward distinction.
Inside from the front door to the back of the house there was as long a passage as possible, the rooms opening out of it. The staircase ran up to a room with an opaque glass window in the door, a second room, and two others connected by a door. The rooms downstairs I hardly remember at all. But in one of them my great-uncle James Jones lay asleep after dinner, a red handkerchief covering his face and trembling in the blast of his snoring which we called "driving the pigs to market".
Through the open window of another, one Mayday, Jack-in-the-Green bounded in to beg a penny, showing white teeth, white eyes, black face, but the rest of him covered and rippling with green leaves. The
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passage was a playground when it was too wet or too dark to be out of doors. Here, when I had at any rate one brother — probably three or four years old when I was five or six — who could run, we two raced up and down the passage to be pounced upon by the servant out of a doorway and swallowed up in her arms with laughter. Upstairs the room with the glass door was at long intervals occupied by a visitor, such as my father's uncle James or my mother's sister, and I think cards were played there.
Except relatives I think there were few visitors to the house. Sometimes the old red-faced gent next door, a court usher, came in: and once as he laid his hand on a large sheet of printed matter, perhaps at an election time, he said impressively, "I am a staunch Liberal, staunch." Once a young couple had tea with us and everyone laughed at some cheerful remark about the lady's name being about to be changed — I and at least one brother slept in one of the two connected bedrooms.
I had no night fears and few dreams. Several times some shapeless invisible thing threatened me at the end of the bed and I lay in terror, trying vainly to scream for help.
On Christmas morning I used to wake up in the dark and smell the oranges and feel my presents, and guess at them and begin an apple and go on to sweets, especially those contained in a cardboard box scented curiously, loaf-shaped, and coloured like a top of a bun, which came from a cousin of my mother's at the Much Birch Vicarage. When I and a brother were
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recovering from scarlet fever we lay or sat up in our cots, while our father in the other room read aloud the Cuckoo Clock. Not a shred of the story is left to me, but I seem to see my father — thought I could not see him at the time — sitting in an arm-chair bent over the book. He also read at least the opening chapters of Great Expectations, with such effect that, though I have never since looked at them, I have an indelible impression of a churchyard in cold and misty marshland and out among the stones a convict in clanking chains, and a tiny feeble boy with the absurd and as it were enfeebling name of Pip.
I do not know whether I read Robinson Crusoe or had it read aloud to me. I loved it entirely, and a faint spice of amusement was added to my love by the repetition of "says I" Two scenes most impressed me. The first was the picture of men tumbling savages over the sides of a ship by means of brushes like a sweep's dipped in tar.
The second was where wolves are pursuing a doomed riderless horse over the snow. But I cannot remember the act of reading this or any other book at home. Fairy Know-a-bit by A.L.O.E. was read to me. The fairy in it was created for the purpose of imparting facts about things in everyday use. The facts though not distasteful passed rapidly through my brain, and the fairy, though probably an inartistic invention, fascinated me and attained such a measure of reality for me that I used to fancy it possible for him to appear from between the leaves of some big old book as he did in
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the story. To my mind the book would have been a certain cookery book with pictures of flesh, fish, and fowl, or dishes.
There were, I suspect, invented fairies in another book which had and has a charm impossible for me either to communicate or, I fear, to make credible. It was my first school prize. The words, "The Key of Knowledge", occurred in its title or they stood out somewhere else. It was illustrated by coloured pictures. But it disappeared, I never had any idea how, before I had read far into it, and I never saw it again.
From time to time down to the present day I have recalled the loss, and tried to recover first of all the book, later on the thread of its story, something that would dissipate from its charm the utter darkness of mystery. For example, fifteen years ago in Wiltshire two strangers passed me and I heard one of them, a big public schoolboy, say to the other, a gamekeeper, "What do you think is the key of knowledge?" and back again came the old loss, the old regret and yearning, faint indeed, but real. There were times when I fancied that the book had held the key to an otherwise inaccessible wisdom and happiness, and the robbery appeared satanically sinister.
I was not much at other boys' houses except for Christmas or birthday parties. We met either in the street or in the back gardens, where some had swings fixed. Most of them lived in the same street, but their parents and mine were not as a rule on terms of more
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than distant acquaintanceship.
The chief party was the doctor's, some time soon after Christmas. There was a great crowd of strange boys and girls whom I had got to like and hate, or be indifferent to, for a few hours, and probably never saw or thought of for another twelve months. Most were older than myself; some, I was conscious, had parents who were richer or of different class; we were restrained and suspicious of one another, and the only unquestionably good things there were the mince pies, jellies, sausage rolls.
Now and then we visited friends in Lambeth, where my father and mother had lived from their marriage up to the time of their removal to Wakehurst Road when I was about two. I remember the girls faintly, not so as to describe them, but well enough to wish that I could see them again to revive their images. In most houses I had at least a preference for one of the girls and liked to be teased afterwards for having kissed her in a game of forfeits, or for shouting her name up the chimney.
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II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS
When I think of school I smell carbolic soap. I see the caretaker by the wall of one room ringing the bell. I deposit my weekly fourpence on the master's desk. I go round, as a privilege, filling the scores of inkpots from a tin with a long thin spout. I join in the one-verse hymn before and after lessons. I see large light bare rooms with a map or two, and boys in long parallel desks facing a master; for we were soon separated from the girls. We repeated aloud "Witney on the Windrush manufactures Blankets". We learned the names of the tributaries of the Thames for ever and ever.
["My weekly fourpence": A reminder that school was not free - but hadn't the 1880 Mundella Act made it so? And if so, what was the fourpence for?]
What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never fired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line of the Hebrides I think I actually loved.
One of the masters, named Jones, was little, with dark prominent eyes, round plump red face and quick steps and fiery temper;
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another, named Spragg, was a tall fairer bony man, who had a deep resonant voice; and I think that once when the two quarrelled the tall one lifted the little one into the air. There was a third named Wigley, a mild man, a chewer of his moustache, who struck me as feeble even before Spragg got the better of him in a tussle.
The head master was short, square-shouldered, lean, pallid, bearded, took long rapid strides with head low and projecting, flat high overhanging forehead, deep-set eyes, always on the verge of anger, a harsh barking voice, a general expression of dark solitary determination. He appeared unexpectedly from time to time in the several classrooms which I passed through in the course of three or four years. Sometimes he went by me in the street, his hands in his black overcoat pockets, an umbrella under his arm, overtaking everybody, with rapid sidelong dark glances.
I remember crawling in and bursting out, but very little about school itself. We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, parsing, were easy to me, and I did them pretty well. Sometimes things were tediously easy to me, sometimes I took a pleasure in overcoming what looked hard and of course in earning praise, reward, a superior position. I rather liked wearing the numbered ticket on examination days, and took pride in having the numbers neatly
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printed in black ink with a 4 rather than an open 4 and so on, as I did in saying, when questioned, that my father was an "Officer" in the Civil Service. Discipline was strict. I think I must have been usually fully employed, save for glances at the clock. At any rate I know more about what I did before and after than in school.
The one moment in school at this time which I cannot forget is when I found myself being lifted from a grating where I had fallen, having been hit hard in the stomach by a boy on my way from the classroom to the main exit. In the hard asphalt playground we played rounders and egg-cap and games with tops, marbles and cherrystones.
Going home, we spun our tops or two of us helped ourselves along by bowling hoops or by playing a progressive game with a marble or a stone each, called Buckalong. We used to exchange things and ratify the deed by touching the iron with which our heels were shod, saying "touch cold iron can't change back'.
We used to make fun of a solitary boy, probably of a better class than ourselves, who used to live in the same street and walked about with a snake round his wrist. We called him "Soppy', prepared to run away. But he never retaliated or took any notice of us.
My friends were chiefly boys of our street; if other boys harassed us we used to say "My father's a policeman" to frighten them. But only one grievance remains in my mind, that an older boy, not of my acquaintance, once lured me to drink urine by offering it to me in a bottle as ginger-beer.
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Some time later on a Sunday I pointed out this boy standing with others by the Three Island Pond, and my father clouted his head.
School was not an affliction, but church or chapel or Sunday school was. At an early age I did not go regularly, nor I think did my parents. They were sober reverent people without a creed, though their disbelief in Hell and the Devil almost amounted to a creed. My father and I made merry over the Devil and the folly of believing in him as we supposed many did.
He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel. Here from the prickly silence of two hundred or three hundred people I gradually came to feel a mild poison steadily creeping into me on all sides. I never made a friend of any of the boys who attended there. A deathly solemnity filled the chapel.
After the service couples walked to and fro or gathered into knots on the pavement outside. The deathly solemnity was strong enough to cling about the people even there in the sunlight: some of them it accompanied to their one o'clock roast beef or mutton. But at first the Sunday-school was my particular allowance. I liked singing and liked the melodies of "Jerusalem the Golden" and "Fair waved the golden corn', and I liked going with all the rest for the annual treat somewhere in Surrey, where I could run about in a wood, become fond of another
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girl or two (I remember one with a very deep but I think also husky voice), eat bread and butter, watercress and slices of cake and drink tea. The confinement in the schoolroom was not quite a positive ill. It was regular, it was inevitable, and until later on there was usually nothing in particular of which it deprived me except liberty.
But Sunday was a bad day and this was the worst part of it. That deathly solemnity, whether we respected it or not, was equally thick in the schoolroom. I became accustomed to making a sort of drug of boredom. I did not rebel, but taking this poison became fairly oblivious to the good or evil that befell Jesus Christ, or Servetus, or myself.
Moreover, I did positively loathe with continuous loathing the trailing with one or more of my brothers along the Sunday streets, in our stiff Sunday clothes and our Sunday hats. I hated these clothes and hats and I felt also that they made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. If the hat was blown off by the wind it was some relief: and I could then stamp on the thing and put it down to the wind and mud. What wonder that I made no friends under this Upas-tree.
The majority of the children came from homes poorer or less refined than mine, and with the exception of one or two girls whom I thought pretty I looked down on them though ever so slightly. The few boys whose parents knew ours, if they never visited one another, never became our friends. Some suspiciousness existed between us which our best clothing did not
[On Servetus, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus [Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. — He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later rejected the Trinity doctrine and mainstream Catholic Christology. After being condemned by Catholic authorities in France, he fled to Calvinist Geneva where he was denounced by John Calvin himself and burned at the stake for heresy by order of the city's governing council.] i.e. ET is being ironic.]
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permit us to destroy. Chapel and Sunday-school were to me cruel ceremonious punishments for the freedom of Monday to Saturday. I have still a profound quiet detestation of Sunday in whatever part of England or Wales it overtakes me, but most of all in London. I think I began learning to hate crowds and societies, and grown-up people, and black clothes, and silk hats and neatly folded umbrellas and shining walking-sticks, and everything that seemed a circling part of that deathly solemnity as I was not.
Nevertheless, I may have looked decidedly a part of it with my shy bored silence, my fear of disagreement or quarrel in public, and my thin long narrow face that always shrank and chilled and stiffened into solemnity under the gaze of grown-up people, strangers, and numbers.
There was, however, always one good thing about Sunday, and that was the biscuits, two large oval ones or one of these and two small round ones, which I found on a bedside chair upon awaking. The crumbs of these biscuits among the sheets became a nuisance; for we got up later on Sundays than weekdays.
[Isn't this where he met the Nobles?]
The best of life was passed out of the house and out of school. I remember going out for the first time after scarlet fever. Perhaps because the spirit of many days had been stored up within me untouched, I felt that I was very strong and could do anything. I started to run; the eagerness of the spirit was overmuch; I stumbled and fell down.
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[The Christmas Sword & Mabel Looms.]
One Christmas morning I woke up and felt a long lean smooth straight cold thing with straps at my bedside. It had a handle, and pulling that with one hand I brought out what I discovered to be a sword, while in the other hand was a scabbard. The daylight came upon me still unsheathing and sheathing the sword, trying hard for the hundredth time to put it back the wrong way.
As soon as I could I fastened the belt round my waist so that the sword hung on the right instead of the left side and went out alone. The streets were empty. I was proud though without spectators. Once or twice the weapon caught between my legs. I marched up the street, crossed the road separating it from the Common and turned to the left between the elm-trees of Bolingbroke Grove, having the road upon my left, the Common upon my right.
[Map - which house/garden/meadow?]
At the top of one of the streets parallel to ours, but at that time divided from it by that big private meadow with the pond and elm-trees, I stopped and looked down. For there lived Mabel Looms, a schoolfellow whom I adored. She had had a Christmas card from me that morning. The street was empty. I walked backwards and forwards along the Grove past the top of the street, waiting, sufficiently proud not to be overcome by long disappointment. How many times since have I waited thus for somebody, with a dog's patience. There began to be others in the streets. At last Mabel came up towards the Common, in the company of some elders. Without a sign I
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continued walking backwards and forwards. They turned to their left at the top, away from our street. I turned in the opposite direction homeward, pleased with my swinging sword and believing that the passers-by admired it. At home they knew well where I had been.
My attachment to Mabel lasted for several years and more than once after it had been broken I attempted to renew it. She was a perfect loving friend. I thought her beautiful. Her hair was light brown, her face round rather than a long face. She had elder sisters — one named Agnes — whom I did not always like; and a brother named Arthur to whom I was indifferent; and a freckled slighter cousin, with a name something like Catherine Haythorn, whom I liked equally for her own and for Mabel's sake.
["The veil over sex thickened — "]
Girls practically never joined in our games: even bowling our iron hoops beside their wooden ones was rare. Those girls who did play much with boys were scandalously talked about, but they were older than I was, and I neither knew nor know anything positive against them.
I only have an idea that I had seen one of them — a deep-voiced dark-skinned good-looking girl who walked with long strides and a slight stoop — coming from among thick bushes with a boy or two boys. This caused laughter and was afterwards mentioned with hints and jeers which I do not think I understood: I became fairly curious and expectant; the veil over the sex thickened.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoop_rolling]
[Barrel hoops? Wheel hoops?]
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The Common and the streets leading up to it were the scene of our principal game. It was played chiefly on Saturday, our whole holiday. We assembled, for example, at the top of the road in the well-trodden garden of a doctor who had a rowdy son; each bringing a weapon or several weapons, wooden swords and pikes, or daggers, shields, pistols, bows, arrows and with horns and trumpets, and perhaps some bread and cheese and an apple or orange.
There sides were chosen. One side went out to seek a fort in someone's garden or among the gorse bushes. Ten minutes later the other set forth, often in two divisions. Sometimes stealth was the rule of expedition, we advanced whispering and in some order. Sometimes everyone was shouting for his own plans and against another's. At other times the methods alternated, the stealth would become wearisome, we began to chatter and disagree, or the riot of anarchy would suddenly strike us as wrong, everyone said "hush", and for some minutes we modelled ourselves on Sioux, Mohicans or Hurons, crouching, pausing, trying to hush the sound of our breathing. We forgot everything in this Indian ideal.
[Can we find a doctor on Bolingbroke Grove? Dd he work at Bolingbroke Hospital? Try 1881 and 1891 Censuses?]
[Sioux: https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&client=opera&hs=W6o&sca_esv=598606570&sxsrf=ACQVn09vMOs9DTbIDxU7OVXKKVo1KuTGgg:1705336976969&q=sioux&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjT3O-l69-DAxWuU0EAHRGMB3oQ0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=2325&bih=1101&dpr=0.8]
[Mohicans: https://www.google.com/search?q=mohicans&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwj--tSn69-DAxVilScCHUmGB4IQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=mohicans&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6BAgjECc6CAgAEIAEELEDOgoIABCABBCKBRBDOg4IABCABBCKBRCxAxCDAToLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwFQsghYzhlgmyBoAXAAeACAAbgBiAH6B5IBAzcuM5gBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=lGClZf7gK-KqnsEPyYyekAg&bih=1101&biw=2325&client=opera&hs=W6o]
[Hurons: https://www.google.com/search?q=hurons&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi1wpq269-DAxUzsCcCHdZEAoMQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=hurons&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgYIABAFEB4yBggAEAUQHjoECCMQJzoKCAAQgAQQigUQQzoICAAQgAQQsQM6BAgAEAM6CwgAEIAEELEDEIMBUIEJWPgTYO0WaABwAHgAgAGmAYgBlAWSAQM2LjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=s2ClZfWcDbPgnsEP1omJmAg&bih=1101&biw=2325&client=opera&hs=W6o]
Nevertheless, the enemy had to be found. Nor were they loth. Someone was sure to show himself and wave defiance, or to leap out on us, supposing we passed by. If seen at a distance they might change the stronghold and there would be a chase. If they were content to stand a storm, the second army would gather all its numbers together and, with
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yells and counter-yells, batter and push them out or be battered and pushed out itself. The struggle was one of character, not weapons. The side possessing the fiercest and most stubborn boys won. The winners would than in turn fortify themselves and sustain an attack; and so it went on, until a mealtime, or nightfall, or rain, or a serious quarrel, finished the war.
[The Boardy Blags — ]
At long intervals fiercer battles were waged. The boys of a neighbouring school of the grammar-school standard looked down upon the Board-school boys, or "Boardy Blags" (i.e. blackguards). The Board-school boys resented this. The feud was usually hardly in so much as a smouldering condition, and so far as I know must have been all but forgotten. Then suddenly it would flame out.
A loose army of Board-school boys several score strong moved along the Grove at the edge of the Common towards the enemy’s school. The army was continually being swelled from the side streets. With all the smaller or more timid boys hanging on its fringes, more angry than warlike, more curious than angry, the numbers were considerable. Stones were the long distance weapons. But rarely, I think, did both sides muster a fairly equal army at the same time. When they came in sight of one another they began to throw stones. They halted, odd stones were thrown here and there, the hangers-on disappeared. I doubt if both sides ever advanced and clashed in hand-to-hand conflict. Usually after some challenging shouts, some wavering
[Very likely to be Battersea Grammar, not Emanuel (since the latter was largely a boarding school at this time.]
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and dissension, the victors knew themselves and set up a shout and moved forward confidently. The smaller army broke and fled down the streets; the larger broke and pursued. Here and there a group kept together and set upon any solitary enemy it could discover. I, who was too small to be in the army, was content to hang on the outer outskirts, pick up the news, and occasionally insult one of the enemy if I remembered that he was one.
As a relaxation we hung about in corners smoking cigarettes of rolled brown paper. Making these, lighting them, puffing them, coughing, relighting them, asking one another if they were alight, and silently enjoying the act and the seclusion, filled hours.
Our sense of discipline was slight and transient. It was not encouraged by doing lessons, a few ridiculous exercises under the eye of an unsleeping master, and playing mostly individualist games in the playground. Being in a little mob increased our boldness and also our ease and safety. According to our tempers, I think we hoped that the others would either shelter us or support us in doing signal deeds. As member of the army, any one of us could most likely insult a passing outsider with impunity: if, however, there had been any swift retaliation the victim of it would often have been left to suffer alone.
[The Common — ]
Therefore the armies did not always wait for a formal order of disbandment.
The Common, for example, offered many temptations to more irregular
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games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and in little thickets. Tall elms and poplars stood about irregularly. And the level spaces suitable for cricket, football and tennis were not many. With this variety the Common, even though the railway ran through it parallel to Bolingbroke Grove and only two or three hundred yards away from it, was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops. For any kind of hiding and hunting games the thickets were excellent. We played the other games in the open spaces.
[The different ponds — ]
The ponds were for paddling in. One of them, a shallow irregular one, weedy and rushy-margined, lying then in some broken ground between the Three Island and the railway, was full of effets [eft, newt] and frogs. Bigger boys would torture the frogs, by cuffing, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat which was the operating table. The seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. At that time I could
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not have done it myself, but my horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity.
I fished for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the long pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of "Backaruffs" or "Pack of Roughs", so I always thought, to the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays. I fished with a worm either tied on the cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam-jar.
Once at least I did as I had seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little "blood worms" that breed in mud, and sticklebacks, even a red-throated one, but never a gudgeon.
[I'm sure I've read another account of dragging for fish on the Common - who was it?]
The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks, perhaps chiefly for its comparative size, that many times I willingly paid a halfpenny for one and let it be believed that I had caught it. Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell, yet never dreamed of eating it. There were carp, too, in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond that lay half-way between the top of our street and the railway.
By the longer pond I once saw a carp many times as big as a gudgeon in the possession of a rough: he had torn its head off to make it fit his jar. Much larger ones were talked about, caught in the Box Pond by the elder brothers of one boy. I saw them fishing there once or twice without a motion of the float in
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the motionless water. Once I tried there myself all alone. My expectations were huge: that I failed completely only increased my respect for the sacred pond.
Bigger boys used to fish in the Penn Ponds at Richmond Park and allowed me to buy from them a perch of four or five inches long, which looked magnificent with its dark bars, standing almost on its head in my little round bowl. There in spite of worms and breadcrumbs it shortly afterwards died. I was pained at coming down in the morning and finding such a magnificent, uncommon and costly creature dead. Nor did I ever like the perch's stiff hard prickly corpse, faded in death, and looking much smaller out of the bowl than inside.
The streets were a playground almost equal to the Common. The labyrinth of them, all running at right angles and parallel to one another, with some culs de sac, could be mastered but indefinitely extended; every month or two I should think I added a street or two to my knowledge. Alone or with others I bowled my hoop up and down them either in purposeless pleasure or on some errand for my mother.
Best of all errands was to the blacksmith's to have a broken hoop mended. The smithy was a primeval forest cave that broke a line of ordinary shops. The bellows snored, the sparks spouted up, and the pallid, gaunt, bare-armed man made the anvil ring its double or its single song. When it was very cold I ran along with hands in pockets striking sparks out of the rough kerbstone with my ironshod
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heel.
At night we often played games of hide and seek with lanterns. We picked up sides, fixed the boundaries which were not to be exceeded, and laid down rules against hiding in our own houses. One side went out to hide, to be followed in a few minutes by most of the other side, except one or two who were left behind to guard the home, which the other side had to reach without being touched. Setting out with bull's-eye shining and a good companion, and exposing the others behind laurel bushes and catching them after a chase; or ourselves being the quarry and eluding capture for the whole evening whether with constant obedience to rules or not — these were great joys. If the game became monotonous we rang people's bells and ran away, or we went into shops and asked for sweets with ridiculous names just invented by ourselves.
On Saturday sometimes I would go to Lambeth, two miles away, to take a message or a parcel for my mother, riding back by tram, or walking in order to spend the fare on sweets. I remember once, too, walking to Chelsea and back with an elder boy. As we went along the far side of the Thames he explained to me why it was women could plunge from greater heights into water than men.
The Battersea side of the river was strewn with prodigious broken architecture very impressive to me and seeming of unknown giant antiquity.
When I was eight or nine, the boundaries of my
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domain were stretched by several miles all at once. I walked to Wimbledon Common. Of the first visit I have no recollection. But I can distinguish two later visits: one because I discovered the joy of throwing stones over into the unknown depths of a great garden and hearing the glass-house break; another because I limped all the way back with a low shoe gone wrong. I did not go alone, but as one of several hangers-on to older boys and girls. We fished here and there with hopes of better things than came out of the Wandsworth Common ponds. We met strange boys there who occasionally possessed or talked about enviable fish.
The three-mile walk was, however, good in itself, whether we went by Wandsworth, Earlsfield, or Wimbledon. We always recognised the old landmarks with pleasure and a kind of surprise. There would be a cage of pigeons or rabbits or guinea-pigs to look at outside a cornchandler's, or an old man with some trait of surliness or quaintness whom we hoped to see again, or a chestnut-tree where we had to stop to throw up at the "conkers', or a shop where we had once bought a specially good halfpenny cake. Other shops and houses had an altogether indescribable charm.
Then Allfarthing Lane was worth going down for its name's sake. We invented explanations and repeated those of our parents. At the top dwelt an old woman in what looked a one-room but who presumably knew and had something to do with the origin of the queer name.
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But above all, whichever way we took, the Wandel had to be crossed.
Going by Wimbledon we had to cross the bridge by the copper mill. You might stop to look down at the fish or along at the fishermen, or to carve your name on the parapet.
In Wandsworth there were two bridges, fishermen hanging over the less frequented one who were never seen catching anything but never exhausted our curiosity.
But best of all was the middle way through Earlsfield, crossing the Wandel at the paper mills. The smell of the mills wafted over a mile and a half on certain still evenings gave me a quiet sort of poetic delight. Hereby the water ran over a steep artificial slant, swift, glittering, and sounding; and sometimes we stayed here and caught minnows instead of going on to Wimbledon. It was the first place where I saw and realised the beauty of bright running water. We paddled with our stockings in our shoes and our shoes tied together and slung over our shoulders. We talked and laughed and shouted and splashed the water. I cannot remember cold or rain or any clouds there.
Perhaps we went away for a part of each summer holiday. If we did, I have forgotten. We went several times to stop with my father's mother at Swindon, and once at least to Brighton on a Sunday. At Brighton the shops were shut. It seemed very much like London. The close smell of meat steam in a restaurant where we had dinner will not altogether vanish. I went out in the Skylark and was sick.
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III. HOLIDAYS
Swindon was a thousand times better. It was delicious to pass Wantage, Challow, Uffington, Shrivenham, to see the 75th, 76th mile marks by the railwayside, to slow down at last to the cry of "Swindon" and see my grandmother, my uncle or my aunt waiting. My aunt was an attendant in the refreshment bar, and sometimes gave me a cake or sandwich to eat amid the smell of spirits, or took me to the private apartments, talking in a high bright voice and showing me round to various other neat women in black with high bright voices and nothing but smiles and laughs. My uncle was a fitter in the Great Western Railway works and knew everybody. He was tall, easygoing, and had a pipe in his mouth and very likely a dog at his heels. I was proud to be with him as he nodded to the one-legged signalman and the man with a white apron and a long hammer for tapping the wheels of all the carriages.
The look of the town pleased me altogether. I could
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think no ill of houses built entirely of stone instead of brick, especially as they seemed to exist chiefly to serve as avenues by which I happily approached to my grandmother's. It was for me a blessed place. The stonework, the flowers in the gardens, the Wiltshire accent, the rain if it was raining, the sun if it was shining, the absence of school and schoolmaster and most ordinary forms of compulsion — everything was paradisal. Nor room ever was as cosy as my grandmother's kitchen. Its open range was always bright. There was a pair of bellows frequently in use. A brass turnspit hung from under the mantelpiece. The radiant steel trivet was excellent in itself but often bore a load of girdle cakes or buttered toast or more substantial things. An old brown earthenware teapot stood eternally upon the hob. Tea-caddies, brass candlesticks, clay pipes and vases full of spills, stood on the mantelpiece. On its walls hung coloured engravings entitled "Spring" and "Summer" and painted in England some time before the Fall, and photographs of me and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinets and Mr. Gladstone, of Belle Bilton, and of an uncle who had died long before I was born. There were chairs and there was an old mahogany table piano at one side. The smell of "Westward Ho" tobacco hung about the room. My uncle got us chatting instantly. He seemed grown up, yet a boy, by the way he laughed, whistled and sang a bit of a gay tune. At supper, with our bread and cheese, or cold bacon, or hot faggots, or
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chitterlings, and pickles, he would now and then give us a little tumbler, or "tot', of ale. My grandmother being all important, omnipotent, omnipresent if not omniscient, she stood out less. She marketed, cooked, cleaned, did everything. She made pies with a pastry a full inch thick, and many different undulant fruit tarts on plates. Above all, she made doughy cakes, of dough, allspice and many raisins, which were as much better than other cakes as Swindon was better than other towns, and always as much better than other so-called doughy cakes. She knew, too, where to get butter which taught me how divine a thing butter can be made. On the other hand, she was a Conservative and a churchwoman. Without her, these holidays would have been impossible, and she gave me countless pleasures. But if I loved her it was largely because of these things, not instinctively or because she loved me. She was marvellously kind and necessary but we were never close together; and, when there was any quarrel, contempt mingled with my hate of her inheritance from semi-rural Wales of George the Fourth's time. She was bigoted, worldly, crafty, narrow-minded, and ungenerous, as I very early began to feel. She read her Bible and sang hymns to herself, sometimes in Welsh. She also sang Welsh songs that were not hymns, in particular one that an old beggar used to sing at Tredegar when she was a girl, something about a son whom the mother was begging not to be married.
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When she wanted to warn me against going fishing some miles off with a strange man she hinted that he might be Jack the Ripper.
She first took me to church. Clad in those uncomfortable clothes, I walked beside her, who looked more uncomfortable in her layers of black. I felt that everyone enjoyed being stiff, solemn, black, except myself. On entering the church she bent forward to pray, dragging me down with her to blur my sight for a similar period. I rose with an added awkwardness in gazing at the grim emotionless multitudes of hats, bonnets, and bare heads. It was an inexplicable conspiracy for an hour's self-torture. The service was a dreary discomfort in which the hymns were green isles. When all was over, we crept with a shuffle, a pause, a shuffle, a pause, out to the tombstones and the astonishing fresh light. I was introduced to other women and discussed. I was always being told how like my mother I was and how tall for my age. My grandmother took me to several old Welshwomen, and they all said, "He's a regular — ." They used to remark how well my father was doing, my grandfather who had long been dead having only been a fitter. To hide something from me, they spoke in Welsh.
Sometimes I was more elaborately shown off. Behind a shop smelling of bacon, butter and acid sweets, I stood up before a stout woman smelling a little less strongly of the same, to recite "The Charge of the Light Brigade". My reward was a penny
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or a screw of sweets.
The only visit of this kind which I enjoyed was to a farmhouse a mile away, though I can only recall the walk, the various gates, the best parlour with a Bible in the window between the lace curtains, and the glass of warm milk. Between her and my uncle who kept the house going I saw much bickering. Spending most of his evenings out at club or public-house, he neglected the garden and I dare say other things. I dimly knew that he was usually courting a farmer's daughter somewhere a few miles out, not always the same one. Sometimes when I was walking with him the girl appeared and joined us and at twilight I returned alone.
The little ivy-covered house, therefore, though I enjoyed the meals and evenings there, was above all a convenient centre for games and rambles. In my earlier visits the rambles of any length were on a Sunday with my uncle. He and I and usually my next brother who was two years younger would set out after a late breakfast. The Club was the first stop. It seemed to be full of grown men in a good temper and very much like schoolboys over their ale, their pipes of shag or "Westward Ho', their
Reynolds News. My uncle would tell them a little about us. They chaffed us. The men talked or whispered. Then before we were really impatient my uncle drained his glass and we got on to the canal-side of the town, not without greetings or a word or two from men lounging in their back-
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gardens over their vegetables, their fowls and pigeons. We kept to the canal for a mile or two, and sometimes another man joined us. The roach played in the deep green streams among the reeds, many of them bigger than any fish we had ever caught, here and there a monster. Better still my uncle would discover a long thin jack close inshore as if anchored. If it did not shoot out with a kick and a swirl of water my uncle probably aimed at it with a stone. One great jack excited us by leaping again and again out of the water, at times so near the bank that we made sure he was ours. But the chief Sunday sport was with water rats. We were fascinated as men yelled encouragements, threats, advice, or praises, and a terrier swam down a rat in spite of its divings. When no dog was handy a rat surprised in mid-stream was a good mark for a stone, a snake's head a more difficult one. The moorhens in the reeds had no more mercy from them, but more often than not escaped. A dead dog was a good deal better than nothing. Not that we were unhappy without something for a mark. We threw flat stones to make ducks and drakes along the sunny water, or sheltering from rain under one of the low stone bridges plunged heavy stones with all our might down into the black depth.
Alongside the canal were many narrow copses of oak with underwood of ash and willow, the resorts of lovers and gamblers. The pleasantest thing I ever did in
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them at that time was to peel rings off the bark of a willow stick, in imitation of a carter's brass-ringed whip. My uncle taught us. He could also fashion a whistle by slipping the bark whole off a section of willow, but I never could. Or he made a "cat" or "catty" by tapering both ends of a round stick six inches long. Hit at one end by a downward blow from a longer stick the cat rose spinning up into the air and had then to be slashed horizontally as far as possible. My uncle could play tipcat better than any boy. In these copses or in the hedges or roadside trees, as we went along, he pointed out the nests. And then at one o'clock after another visit to the Club, home to a dinner of lamb, green peas, and mint-sauce, followed by rhubarb tart and custard.
Perhaps it was a little later that I first went out fishing with my uncle. He had not the patience of a fisherman. But there was nothing he did not know: the very winch that he used was made in the factory surreptitiously. He caught roach, and before long I followed him. Even better than this was the sport of seeing him confound the water bailiff who asked for his licence. What with gay lies, chaff and threats, the man had to go. We feared nothing at my uncle's side. These, however, were special week-end delights, for Saturday afternoons or Sundays. The rest of the week was spent mainly in the streets, on the canal-side adjacent, and in the nearer meadows. I liked seeing the
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thousands of men going by on pavement and roadway for ten minutes before work started and after it ended at the factory. The variety of staid men and jaunty men, old men and boys, tall and stocky men, the frowners and the smilers, fascinated me with endless indolent inarticulate half-conjectures; and suddenly out of the multitude my uncle — or for a moment once or twice a man extremely like him. Straight out of that mysterious pageant, the one positively and entirely living one, he used to come into the house, into the kitchen, into his chair and begin to eat. The slower thinner weekly procession to market was the other great sight. Curious wizened old men with old hats, enormously stout women with shawls and black bonnets, smiling rosy ones with feathers, drove by. Their little carts were laden with eggs, butter, fowls, rabbits, and vegetables, from Lydiard and Shaw and Parton and Wootton Bassett.
One or two always stopped at our gate, and the woman came to the door with a broad flat basket of eggs or butter under a cloth, and very rarely, some mushrooms. She said, "Good morning. How are you this morning? Got your little grandson here again. Nice weather we're having. Mustn't grumble. Yes, the butter's one-and-two now — " While my grandmother went for her purse I stood at the open door and looked at the shrewd cheerful woman or at her dog who had come for a moment from under the cart. She with her cheerful and shrewd
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slow way was as strange and attractive as any poet's or romancer's woman became afterwards, as far away from my world. I never knew her name, nor did she use ours. I very soon knew a score of boys living near. I could tell them about London and share with them the young carrots stolen from my grandmother's garden. I got some credit with them by telling them that at home we got our coal a ton at a time; for they were all sons of fitters or even labourers at the factory, earning smaller salaries than my father.
They in turn taught me their speech and their games. The best game was an evening one, called Urkey. One boy who was Urkey stood still by a tin can while the others hid. When a shout told that they had found a hiding he went in search of them. His object was to see one and run home to the can, crying "I Urkey Johnny Williams'. If the one thus singled out, or any other, could get to the can first and kicked it away, the game began all over again. Otherwise the one successfully Urkied had to take his place at the can. We used to have eggs boiled brown in coffee grounds at Easter, and to wear an oak-spray on May 29, "Oak Apple Day'.
In August we went together to the Fete in the Park and had a bag of cake, and tickets for roundabouts. But my strongest and most often considered memory of this period was my second visit to Wales at the age of nine. It is associated with an incident which preceded
[54]
and almost frustrated it.
[The cigar on the Common — ]
One evening after tea I went up on to Wandsworth Common with some bigger boys and sat on the seat by the Box Pond. A cigar was produced, lit and given to me to smoke. A few minutes afterwards I was crawling down the road by giddily clinging to the railings of garden after garden. I slunk into the house neglecting my mother's question "What's the matter?" but soon answering it by deeds not words. My father said that I should not go to Wales. Nevertheless, I went.
I remember the names of the stations, "Risca", "Cross Keys" . . . I walked through a park among great trees that stood at stately distances from one another: there were long-horned shaggy cattle about. I saw the river Ebbw racing over stones, and mountain ash trees on rough rising ground. I saw chimneys and smoke and ruins and whitewashed walls. I stopped at Abertillery with friends and met Welsh people who spoke no English.
Above all I remember a house alone on a hill with a parrot and a dark girl named Rachel, pretty and dirty, who was down on her knees scrubbing the kitchen hearth. I made friends with the boy and the girl of the house in Abertillery and played with them among rolls of stuff in a dark shop. With my mother I drove out along a road among trees and above running water to Pontypool. I went to Aberbeg . . . . That is all the stuff of an abiding memory. These things joined forces with the street in Caerleon, the river and the Round Table, and also with phrases
[55]
and images from The Adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, and a curious illusion of a knight with a shield kneeling at the foot of a pillar in the photograph at home of Tintern Abbey.
When I returned to London and school and a question was asked about a Welsh town beginning, the teacher hinted, with Aber, I frantically raised my hand muttering Abertillery, Abertillery, sorely distressed at being unnoticed, at being positively rebuked with Aberdare, which I had never heard of. But a nucleus had been formed, to which I gradually added fact and legend, the legend, e g., I know not how true, that an ancestor, a sea-captain, riding home from Neath with money killed a man who set upon him to rob him.
At about this time I went to stay at my great-uncle's house at Limpley Stoke: it may, in fact, have been part of the same holiday which took me to Wales. The deep husky voice out of my uncle's beard, the goat in the garden who playfully butted the old man and drove me down the steps of the area, a story of a pet monkey who burst and died from overeating, and a vision of pale quarries, are the absurd total of my recollection. After the visit my uncle sent me a French Dilectus with the hope that I should soon master "the French genders'.
I was now comparatively good at lessons, enjoyed excelling, only once played truant and did not enjoy it, was hardly ever caned, and earned a leather-bound gilt-
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edged New Testament as a prize. And at home I read many books of travel, natural history and fiction. As birthday or Christmas presents I received The Compleat Angler; The Marvels of the Polar World, about ice, snow, Esquimaux and seals, and other books containing picturesque descriptions of torrid or frozen lands; Dick's Holidays and what he did with them, an adult's chronicle of a boy's country holiday, with insidious information on every page; Hans Andersen, Grimm, Holme Leigh's Fairy Tales, The Swiss Family Robinson, Westward Ho! —
Thus I grew to think of places where jaguars lay in wait for men upon overhanging branches and of times when houses were made of barley sugar and witches cooked children and ate them. I was still well content to remain, except during these readings, a citizen's son of London in the "eighties of the nineteenth century, but a citizen with a sometimes fantastically light grasp of facts, as when I slipped a letter addressed to my father in one part of the country inside a newspaper for my mother in another part. Part of the pleasure of a book was still, I think, the strangeness of words as well as things. Thus I was arrested by the quaintness of Izaak Walton's spelling, as in "pearch" for perch, of his archaic names such as "luce" for pike, of unfamiliar personal names like those of the travellers Speke and Grant, as well as by the nasty horror of Africans eating fat torn from a live human body in Sir Samuel Baker's book. These things
[NB the explorer's names were used in local streets.]
[It's well worth reading Wikipedia: Samuel Baker — What a man!]
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were no less and no more remote than the fairy tales. I did not often feel that they were part of my world of newspapers, a comfortable home and a clockwork school. But several houses became associated with certain wonders out of books, either by accident or because at some point they resembled places in the books.
The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibals' footprints. In return, there were people and houses without associations possessing qualities in common with the people and houses in wonderful books, and I cannot decide whether my life owed more to my books or my books more to my life. I slipped from one world into the other as easily as from room to room. I do not know how much I may have dwelt on the story in later years, but Grimm's Hansel and Grethel, the children going out into the wood to be lost, dropping a trail of stones behind them and finding their way back, but failing to do so when they used breadcrumbs which the birds ate, came to be to my mind one of the great stories of the world.
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IV. BOOKS AND SCHOOL FRIENDS
For the most part I remember rather the joy of having and reading books than particular passages. I remember the eager walks over Wandsworth Common to borrow volume after volume of the Waverley novels, but of Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Peveril of the Peak and The Talisman, not a rack [??] is left. Of The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder rather more is left. They gave me an idea of a noble savage. The Pathfinder himself towers in memory as grandly as Milton's Satan but more dimly. The name of the girl Cora has folded itself up in my mind like a gentle snake . . . . I read some of Scott's poems in the same year. They made deeper impressions than the novels. I was continually repeating with a throb:
With Chester charge and Lancashire,
or
Charge, Chester, charge!
On Stanley on Were the last words of Marmion.
The duel between FitzJames and Roderick Dhu was
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the greatest thing of all. The next best was Roderick Dhu's whistle that caused armed warriors suddenly to rise up out of the mountain bracken. I could scarcely bear the excitement of describing these scenes to another boy as we walked along Bolingbroke Grove. My voice was thick and broken with the effort of "And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu'. The excitement caused a not entirely unpleasant aching tenderness in a certain part, just as open praise did and still does. Of course when I found a family of Rodericks in Swindon I linked them to the poem. The only poems which I remember having read aloud to me at an early age were Longfellow's. My father used to read or recite The Children's Hour very often. The pathos, or his sense of it, touched me, and I received faint but delicious images of "grave Alice" and "laughing Allegra" and "Edith with golden hair'.
The Children's Hour, poem by Longfellow: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44628/the-childrens-hour-56d223ca55069]
I could also enjoy impressions in the minor key. The only one of the many songs we sang at school which I can recall was in the minor key. It was a kind of dirge for a North American Indian. I can still hum the melody, but I remember no more of the words than "Far far away in the depths of the wild wood". These were several times repeated. The rhyme to "wild wood" was I believe "childhood'. I used to sing this to myself, and have periodically returned to it ever since. I liked also "Lucy Gray', the one poem which I remember to have learnt at the Board-school: but I never could
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understand "and snapped a faggot band'. I do not think I had any tangible sadness to which the song gave utterance.
[Wordsworth, "Lucy Gray", https://www.thereader.org.uk/featured-poem-lucy-gray-by-william-wordsworth/.]
There was for me at that time no sadness, e.g., in the destruction of the orchard of the great house near by, and the portioning of its park-like meadow into streets. Anybody could enter now. We pillaged artichokes. Some boys took sackfuls of the soil and I helped one to drag his down the street; out of the wounds thus worn in it, it was bleeding dark mould on the pavement.
My books did not hamper my games, nor in any way alter them except that I could not wear sword and shield hereafter without FitzJames haunting and inspiring me. I played as much as ever and walked to Wimbledon more and more.
I could also enjoy kinds of fighting where it was impossible to think of poetry. For example, I had a long tussle with a rough after a quarrel during fishing, and was only beaten by the intervention of a third party armed with an old kettle. It was fun, too, to battle at a distance with stones, dodging and casting at the same instant. In one of these combats I got a deep scalp wound made ever more memorable by my aunt fainting at the blood.
While we were at this house my mother presented me with four brothers at intervals of two years, but, as I have no recollection of them during that period beyond the fact that on certain dim occasions in our street or at Swindon one or other was present, I say nothing about them. Being thus seven in family we moved to a large
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house in one of the roads parallel to the old one.
[This was [61?] Shelgate Rd. ]
The great long low windowless van that we stamped about in — the bread and cheese eaten anyhow in the confusion — the odd jobs of fetching and carrying — these were pleasures. I am not at all sure now whether I made one of the journeys on the tail of the cart. And yet I am perfectly sure that the name of the elder boy who shared these pleasures was _______ and that my mother said he was a good boy and had been very useful.
On the first few days after the move I went several times most of the way down from school to the old house before realizing my mistake. Whether I had regrets for it or not, it began almost at once to have a dreamy charm too faint to be describable. It was a visible piece of the past, a skeleton, a hollow shell that did without us.
Of course the new house had also a charm. Its size allowed an empty room for us to play in, and a box-room. Perhaps it was not until a little later that the box-room became attractive, because it was dark and because in it was a wooden box containing inexhaustible treasures. These were chiefly old books, old magazines, old photographs of unknown people. Many and many a time I took them all out, sometimes in search of something I had noticed among them before and then not troubled about, sometimes in more uncertainty but equal eagerness, at other times with no object save testing the inexhaustible surprises of the box. At intervals of a year or less I must have
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taken everything out and put it back again, with moments of hastiness when things were moved in armfuls, fully a dozen times. I think I could do it at least once yet . . . My slender undefined expectations connect the search with that lost book of my earlier childhood about the key of knowledge. But I forbear to amplify this.
One of the discoveries I made was of Pickwick Papers. Sitting in the dust with dusty eyes I read about sticklebacks in the Hampstead Ponds. I could not get on much farther. Too many of the people had ridiculous names. The books had nothing in common with the Waverley novels or the Compleat Angler or Sir Samuel Baker's travels.
At about this time I began to keep my own books on a shelf of their own and to paste numbers inside them as I had seen done with library books: to raise the numbers to a respectable size I took my two next brothers into partnership and we lent them out to one another with formality. The sum of our united ingenuities would at no time have been very great. However, I had my own way. It was usually easy for me to get it. While I was still at the Board-school I was conscious of possessing some power over my physical superiors, though the use of it was unconscious. I cannot say how much it was exerted, if it was at all, by means of wheedling, begging, cringing, or perhaps putting others into the position of feeling brutal or awkward if they refused me.
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My later days at the Board-school were pleasant enough. My class sat in the same room and was taken by the same master as a special small class of the oldest boys in the school. They used to read accounts of the Massacre of Glencoe and produce essays on what they remembered. I made friends with one or two of them, laughed at their jokes and catch-phrases, and was expected to enjoy the picture of the gravid uterus of a rabbit in a book which one of them showed me.
Towards the end of these days I spent the greater part of a summer term in a Board-school in Swindon where the head master was a friend of my father's. I became a Wiltshire boy in accent. I made friends and sweethearts too, and at the Fête in August spent all the day and evening with a girl on each side of me — I do not think I had ever before or since so much pride and confidence. To one of the girls, a dark sturdy beauty named Laura, I was more or less faithful for several years. Though she knew and did nothing that I valued, to have a girl by me on a walk pleased me intensely. I suppose the love of having my own way guided me surely for the most part towards girls who were not flirts.
I liked also elder girls. Some of the most blissful hours I ever spent were in country walks with a buxom Welsh cousin named Florence, who was probably eight or nine years my senior. She was staying at my grandmother's one summer when I was, and she and I used to walk along the quiet road, or over meadows, to
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Shaw or Lydiard. I thought her beautiful, her rosy face, her voice, herself beautiful. To me she was all sweetness and kindness. We used to go into a farmhouse door or into the milking shed and get milk and perhaps eat a lardy cake. I remember her taking out her purse. Everything about her was somehow sweet and perfect. I suppose I had a sort of happy unfettered adoration for her without knowing it. I never saw her after that summer.
I exchanged the Board-school when I was ten for a private school. Here there were fifty or sixty boys of from ten to seventeen years of age, perhaps half of them boarders. They were the sons of tradesmen, professional men, moderately well-to-do clerks, and men of small independent means.
[Which school is this? 50 or 60 boys - half of the boarders - is it's not too small to be Battersea Grammar? Small gravel playground. Halbrake School? Almost certainly.]
Only one of them had I known before. He preceded me by a term from the Board-school and at once asserted his superiority by making a fool of me. In the small gravel playground there was a swing consisting of a long board suspended at either end by a pair of chains. A boy at each end could work it up to what seemed to me a terrible height, the prime fear being to jump off backwards from your position just as the board began to swing forward. I took my first ride with this old school-fellow. The bell for lessons rang while we were well up, and he dropped off, leaving me helplessly to wait and watch the school assemble, and pointing me out with malice as well as grins when I at last took my
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place.
The schoolroom was a large single hall adjacent to the large old brick house where the boarders lived with the head master. The three classes under the head and two assistants all occupied the same room, but faced different ways. In the fourth quarter of the room stood the boarders' more substantial desks, where they kept silkworms and white mice. The boarders predominated in other ways. The familiar life together had given them a style and subject matter of their own. Knowing the masters privately they treated them with open ease and half-concealed amusement. They were pretty faithfully imitated by the day boys. But the head master was of stone. He wore a black gown. So long as he was in the room no sound was to be heard beyond a dismal foot shuffling, a pen dropping, a boy asking a question, a master answering or explaining, the head dictating or clearing his throat.
While he was out the hubbub was so general that the assistants could hardly single out a particular one to punish, for if it had a ring-leader it was some spirited bright popular boy whom it would be unpleasant and ruinous to punish.
I continued to accumulate information in history and geography, to do harder and harder sums, to copy models of handwriting. I learnt a few Latin declensions and conjugations. With the rest of the school I sat listening to Mr. _______ talking physiology as if the body were a newly discovered machine and we were angels.
Just before the holidays like everyone else I wrote a
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letter to my dear parents telling them what had been done during the term, when the holidays began and how long they were to last. But I learnt also how to keep silkworms alive, and added to the boarder's pocket-money by buying as many as I could. I had a penny or twopence a week. One of the masters, a black-haired snub-nosed kindly energetic freshman, was fond of me. He chaffed me about the freckles I got in the summer holidays; he gave me the Lamplighter and numbers of Horner's Penny Stories; he came round to see my father and offered to take me to the baths and teach me to swim. I had no particular liking for him or gratitude for his liking for me, and when I left the school I left all but the first of his letters to me unanswered and so tired his attention.
I only knew one boarder at all well. He was a Welsh boy from Flint several years older than myself, and wanting to do something to please him, I gave him the leather-bound New Testament which I had received as a prize at the Board-school.
I cannot recall that boarders and day boys had any united or organised games except paper-chases. A paper-chase made one of the Saturdays at this school a great and notable day for me. For I then discovered a piece of country as it seemed to me, exactly like the real country at Swindon and quite unlike the commonland at Wimbledon. Here were private but not inaccessible copses, hedges with oaks in them, and
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wandering paths, rough lanes, scant cottages. I got left behind and lost the rest of the school except one older boy. We had bread and cheese at the "George Inn'. That day I ran, walked and crawled six or seven miles out and the same distance back. For a year it may be I left this piece of country unrevisited.
I made several friends among the day boys. One who had a deep voice and must have been much older used to take me out to share his adventures on a double "sociable" tricycle; and he gave me white rats. But I had most to do with a boy only a year or two older than myself, named Jonathan, who introduced me to some of his father's workshops, and particularly the carpenter's shop. Adjoining this shop were roomy houses for pigeons of several kinds, Belgian hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and white rats.
Fine afternoons, therefore, had now scarce any advantages over wet ones. Making additions to the cages, cleaning them out, feeding the birds and animals, handling them, selling or exchanging them, talking about them, set the hours rolling lazily, swiftly. In a day or two I had learnt all, alas! that I ever did about the use of saw, hammer, screwdriver, and brace. That is to say I was now a quick unscrupulous maker of cages of all sizes. I fitted doors to them, fronts of split wood and wire-netting, roofs of tarred felt laid upon laths. I spent all the shorter sections of my spare time in making, altering, and mending cages for pigeons, rabbits and white mice.
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I retained few of my old school friends. One of them, though he too had moved and in the opposite direction, made several attempts to keep up our friendship. He was a very swift runner and always walked in the middle of the road wearing sandshoes. The short period of separation made me shy when he came to the door on a Saturday afternoon, so that I was almost inclined to deny that I knew him. He must have felt this and at length altogether ceased to come. Before long I was sorry for this.
I must have begun keeping pets soon after entering the new school. Through them, or rather through the pigeons, I got to know other fanciers, men and boys, in the neighbourhood. For example, a pigeon house hung on the wall of a house in the street at right angles to ours and visible a hundred yards away from the back garden where I kept my pets. I used to see the owner, a much older boy called Henry, leaning out of the window to attend to his pigeons or to set them at liberty for a flight. They ascended half a mile high and remained circling for a great time, or if they did not and tried to perch they were driven up again with loud clappings. The boy's whistle to his pigeons, a peculiar shrill anxious one, and a mild luring one, I acquired as soon as possible. Still I felt that the boy looked down on me. My birds never flew much higher than the topmost chimneypots, and they used to get lost or caught by cats. One day I was sure that a pigeon of mine had
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entered his cage and I went round to ask for it. Thus we became acquainted. He began by denying the fact with a mixture of indignation and chaff, and I think he made a small charge before restoring the bird. But I supposing this was the custom or admiring his superior age, skill, and aplomb, was far from complaining. I accepted his patronage gladly. He used to come round for me in the evening with a whistle instead of a knock — not like either of the pigeon calls, but very expressive. He would begin with pairs of notes imperious in tone, and repeated if necessary several times more and more loudly. Then he waited, sauntering backwards and forwards outside. If I did not come out he changed to a more questioning call which had in it a despairing quality or one meant to raise despair in me. It gave me a last chance. Often he had a bird to show me for admiration or for sale. I found it hard ever to refuse anything he praised to me. In my case to acquire a new pigeon was a delight. So in I used to go, if success was at all possible, to tell my father and mother about this supreme opportunity, in short to ask for a shilling or one-and-six. Not too seldom, I succeeded. At times I possessed a dozen of different breeds — athletic homers, heavy wattled antique-looking dragons, dainty almond tumblers, feminine owls. For a few days I rejoiced in a pair of red-ruffed Jacobins sent me from Wales, delicate pretty birds; but they never flew beyond the roof and seldom higher than the fence, where a cat caught
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first one, then the other.
This was one of the few sorrows of pigeon-keeping. The pleasures were innumerable. Chief of all was to set the birds free, watch them to the roof, clap till they flew round and round, draw them down by whistling and scattering seed. The mere purchasing of seed out of my pocket-money was a pleasure, especially as I was always experimenting with my own fancifully proportioned mixtures of dari, barley, maize, tares, and peas. Even the four useless eggs laid by a devoted couple of hens were not thrown away on me: I discovered that no young ever came from them, and thereafter I diligently blew every one and treasured them. The great excitement was tempting a stray bird down with the rest into the pigeon house. Only once did I have a stray safely trapped and housed. She was for me a bird of mark, with the name of the Columbusian Society on her wings. I kept her proudly with infinite expectation of her offspring. I was disappointed. For her one pair of fertile eggs I could not leave patiently to hatch. As soon as the young began to make a stir in them I answered them by chipping the shell with a pin; they were pricked and died unborn.
The rabbits were less interesting. But they were possessions. I learnt to handle them in the right manner. It was something to bury one from time to time. Also the business of rabbit-keeping took me to new country. One of our servants had a brother-in-law in Battersea who was a fancier, and I used to go down there to see
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his animals, and occasionally to buy one. One of the shops in his neighbourhood sold bran or pollard more cheaply. Such were my triumphs. And I remember that once when coming home from a visit to this man I found in my overcoat pocket a sum of money amounting to about a couple of shillings. Probably it was the change from some purchase for my mother which I had forgotten to hand over. It happened a second time. I mention only for the sake of pointing out that after the first surprise at each find I had a feeling of good fortune, mysterious indeed but not puzzling. I believe that I really thought the money had entered my pocket by some unique, magic accident.
My companions were now boys exclusively. I had no sisters; my girl cousins I saw but two or three times in all my childhood; none of my friends had sisters of their own age; my father and mother had but a few close acquaintances, who rarely came to the house and hardly ever brought their children, boys or girls, with them. Mabel and I had forsaken one another. If we met we smiled without words, without stopping.
Then there were the servants. Usually one general servant shared the work of the house with my mother, everything except the washing. That was done by a woman who came over from Lambeth every week on Mondays. Her great red arms and her clean rapid ways awed me, her glass of beer and plate of bread and cheese in the middle of the morning awed and delighted me.
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Her rule lasted for many years; the servants rarely stayed more than a year or two. Their names, Eliza, Emily, Jane, Martha, call up individual but indefinite images of the bodies and natures of those girls: Eliza, grey-eyed, round-faced, bustling, laughing; religious Emily, cross-eyed, mild, severe; clever Jane, white, hazel-eyed, pretty but with a large nose and a tendency to a cold; Martha, Irish, blackhaired, always talking or singing her song of The press-gang came for William When he was all alone, but safe and sound, and much missed when she went to Australia. Then there were two sisters, Alice and Clara, who were with us together, and had conspicuous powers as actresses and managers. They were always dressing up themselves or us, to surprise my father, who had no wish to be surprised. Alice, the elder, a tall dark girl, had the supreme gift of being able to step out from the attic window on to the gutter and up on to the roof, and move freely there or look down on us in the garden. These sisters regarded themselves as not exactly servants. That they knew an aged German count whom we used to see about in the streets gave them a sort of glory. Our quiet stiff home could not contain these two very long: even Alice without Clara proved impossible. For a time we tried mother's helps instead of servants. We called them "Miss' Brown and so on. One
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was a prettyish small thing who once hid herself under my bed and emerged while I was undressing: it made me indignant at first as I always was if taken unawares, but a little vain afterwards because I thought she liked me.
The most exciting was a girl from Hampshire, a rather handsome, tall, bony, and pale girl, a farmer's daughter who had left home after some quarrel. I think she said her father was a gentleman farmer. She talked a lot about horses. At supper she did practically all the talking, and I remember that my father did not much want to be amused when she was telling of the lovers who would get lost in her father's copses on fine evenings. She was a merry creature. She and a pretty friend who came to see her, an actress with soft dark hair and a romantic name, wanted to romp with us and be familiar. But I drew off, suspiciously, feeling that I did not understand them, wishing not to give myself away. I left them alone with my younger brothers, drawing enigmatical figures on paper and asking riddles and laughing both openly and to themselves. If I could not hold my own I would retreat and not be victimised.
Miss — also did not stay long. I was sorry when she was gone. Nearly all these women I liked in some way. For one thing, they were very patient and kind, while several of them, I can see now, I admired and enjoyed admiring for their sweet looks or language or presence.
The only woman I had anything to do with regularly was my mother, and except at meals and bed
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time I did not see much even of my mother. Occasionally we played cards or draughts together in the evenings. My mother played the piano a little; my father sang "Bonny Mary of Argyle" to her accompaniment. No doubt often I went to London with them. For example, I was taken to a pantomime, where the mannish donkey and the clown wreathed in sausages seemed to my memory worth retaining. London made no impression: I simply recall sitting inside a bus and studying the list of fares at the inner end. I suppose I had gradually in my own populous and busy neighbourhood become accustomed to something like all that could be seen or heard in London except the river. Even a visit when I was thirteen with only a lesser boy for company left me nothing to recall it by except my pride at making my way to a big shop in Cheapside unaided. I only knew enough to make a dim picture of squalor, rags and blood, when I heard the newspaper boys hoarsely breaking the silence of the cold foggy night with shouts of "Horrible murder in Whitechapel. Another Ripper Murder. Horrible murder."
["The five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper were Mary Ann Nichols (found Whitechapel August 31, 1888), Annie Chapman (found September 8, 1888), Elizabeth Stride (found September 30, 1888), Catherine Eddowes (also found September 30, 1888), and Mary Jane Kelly (found November 9, 1888). "]
[Mary Ann ("Polly") Nicols, the first, had until recently worked as a maid[?] in Rose Hill Road?]
Of course I continued, more and more often, to accompany my parents to the Unitarian chapel on Sunday. For a time I was a regular attendant because I sang in the choir. The sound of "How lovely are the messengers" was pleasant to me, but it was a curious sensation altogether remote from my games and walks and pigeon-keeping. It was an oasis, the mirage of an
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism / Servetus =
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oasis, in the chapel desert. Sitting between my father and my mother, I watched now the sad solemn gentle preacher against a background of Faith, Hope, and Charity, now the feathers in the stout lady's hat just in front of us, now the momentarily visible exquisite profile smooth soft cool glowing skin and perfect scarlet lips of her daughter, the bald head of her husband, and now fleetingly the serried multitudes, the spectacled women, the old men, the pale young men, all in suspended animation.
Though some of these seemed to me absurd I had never a glimmering of the courage needed to laugh at them. Faith, Hope, and Charity were words which I could perhaps just dissociate from their vulgar uses, but as I knew of no other use the process left them words pure and simple. Perhaps my weariness in chapel was mingled with something which specialists would label as religious. I only know that where people were sad and solemn I was overcome, half-suffocated by the sadness and solemnity. What was read and preached was to me airy nothing. I knew of no virtues except truthfulness, obedience, self-sacrifice, total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. Because it was more comfortable than disobedience as a rule I was obedient. I habitually told the truth when I had nothing which I thought could easily be gained by lying. I stole biscuits and sweets from my mother's cupboard and was tearfully penitent when found out. I never wanted to drink ale except when my uncle poured it out for
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me in a tot. As for self-sacrifice it was mostly incredible. But I liked to please my mother and keep undisturbed the love that was between us. I sometimes did little unexpected kind things out of my tenderness for her, and was always glad to be the one to take up tea for her if she was unwell, and so on, or to help her with the housework when she was left servantless. But with her as with everyone I was deceitful and had dread of being caught doing what I ought not to do. It was a great and frequent dread. For I felt that most things a boy liked doing annoyed some elder or another; that to annoy an elder was the essence of wrong. My solution was to try not to annoy at the same time that I was doing almost as I liked. Deceit and dread increased rapidly. My mother never attempted to add to the religion of the chapel. On the contrary she roused my indignation at the two conspicuously Christian aunts who had made her childhood in that dark house at Newport miserable. If she or I had taken more trouble I might have been convinced that all religious people were cruel hypocrites.
My grandmother was the only influence on the other side. She persuaded me that I should be really good if I knelt down night and morning by my bed and "said my prayers', and for a short time I did so. It was "Our Father" which I repeated, though it was and has ever remained Greek to me. Once only I tried hard to mean something in prayer. There was to be a treat in the country next day, and as
I was going downstairs I turned in to my mother's dark room and, throwing myself down beside the bed with a violence intended to thwart hesitation, doubt, and ridicule, I begged "God" to make it a fine day to-morrow. The day was fine, but I
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never prayed again. I used to tell my father and mother of this half in jest. I suppose there was religion at my second school. It has been forgotten along with all but the names of the Lamplighter and Horner’s Penny Stories.
Not even yet can I recall anything distinctly of my brothers beyond the fact of an inconstant feud with the eldest of them. Black-haired and dark-eyed like my father, he was shorter for his age, more athletic and acrobatic than I, and shared none of my tastes or hobbies. He was the favourite of my Swindon uncle. Whenever our differences culminated we began by each abusing the other for his darkness or fairness. My brother shouted "pale face’, though I had in fact more colour than he ever had; what I called him I do not know. Then we came to blows. I could overcome his strength, but not his spirit. This feud was at times exceedingly bitter, and in one quarrel I was wounded on the head by a clothes prop.
At other times it took a less violent form. If he admired one hero, I admired his enemy. On the wall of our bedroom facing us as we lay in bed hung a picture of two little girls, one slightly fairer and littler than the other. We laid claim to these girls as sweethearts. I of course chose the fair one; my
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brother of course chose the dark one, as he called her, because she was the less fair. Our hostility had very deep roots. A fright that I once unintentionally gave my brother by rising up unexpectedly draped in a green tablecloth may have had something to do with it; and I remember that when he awoke screaming and sweating at night sometimes nobody was less likely to quiet him than I; he screamed all the more at sight of me. We saw little of one another except on Sundays and on holidays, since he and one or two of our younger brothers still went to the Board-school.
[There's a record of at least one of them at Belleville on the Ancestry site.]
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V. SCHOOL GAMES AND EARLY READING
I did not stay long at the second school. The head master moved into the country and his successor not attracting my father, I was sent to a day school about two miles away in Battersea. This meant that I had my dinner at school, thus spending eight or nine hours a day at a stretch in greenless streets.
[ET's first school was Belleville (i.e. the Board School at the end of his road). But the others? These have always been an enigma.]
[The "second school" is usually said to be Battersea Grammar, which moved to St John's Hill in 1875[?]. But I think it was in fact Halbrake School (Park Road, later called Elsynge Road). The head teacher (Revd Parr) left at around the time ET says his father moved him. Incidentally, this may have been the school of "grammar-school standard" that the "Boardy Blags" fought against (rather than Emanuel?). ["The boys of a neighbouring school of the grammar-school standard looked down upon the Board-school boys, or "Boardy Blags" (i.e. blackguards)"].]
[The third school? Probably Sir Walter St John's — right distance (c.2 miles). Plus with a connection to the Bolingbroke/St John family at Lydiard Park, Wiltshire, which ET frequented. And also with a connection to Battersea Grammar. Also notice below a reference to "the neighbouring training school" — i.e. St John's (if that's what it was called — the Survey of London: Battersea confirms their close relationship. But wasn't Sinjuns by this time only the junior dept (with Battersea Grammar the senior)? If so, at what age did children transfer (if they did)? I vaguely recall Sinjuns had a ["middle school"?] department, which ET would have attended.]
By 1860 the name "Sir Walter St John's School" was being used. The Elementary Education Act 1870 had the result of splitting off the Upper School to form the newly founded Battersea Grammar School and in 1880 the Elementary School (part of the Lower School) was closed. The next change occurred in 1902, when the school was reorganised as a Secondary School."
[See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Grammar_School. Plus the Survey of London: Battersea is excellent, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Walter_St_John%27s_Grammar_School_for_Boys
The Survey of London: Battersea article appears to confirm and extend the above - see battersea-vol-49-chap-4 Schools & Colleges.pdf.]
The playground was asphalt; again there were no organised games, but a dozen groups playing leap frog, fly the garter, or tops, or chasing one another, or simply messing about.
"Fly the garter" — if that is its right name — was a grand game to see played by a dozen of the biggest boys. I forget how it came about, but by degrees at length there were four or five boys bent double, forming a continuous line of backs. Each grasped the one in front of him and the first of them had his head, protected by his hands, against the playground wall. From half-way across the playground a big boy ran at a gallop, his iron-shod heels pounding the asphalt, towards this line of boys who could see him approaching between
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their legs. Reaching the line and putting his hands upon the first back to help him leap he leaped forward into the air. A brilliant leaper would use only one hand for the take off: the other gave a sonorous smack on the right place in passing. With legs outspread he flew along the line of backs, and alighted upon the fourth or fifth of them. The lighter his weight, the more fortunate was the steed thus accidentally mounted: the heavier, the greater was the chance that both together crashed to the ground. Then, I think, the leaper added another to the line of backs and set the next leaper an impossible task. The last stayer had a good double row of admirers, silent during the run and the leap, uproarious at the alighting. We smaller boys climbed or tried to climb any upright or horizontal post and rails about the school, on the scaffolding, for example, during some repairs.
[For more info, check e.g. https://www.victorianlondon.org/childhood/streetgames.htm.]
Tops, chiefly peg tops, we played endlessly. We tried to destroy our opponent’s top by casting our own at it and impaling it with the peg. Or we "chipped" brass buttons or other tops into and out of a ring, by taking up our own top on to the hand while spinning, causing it to sway upon a fixed centre hollowed in the palm, and then casting it at the object with all the rotatory force thus gained. Or we strove against one another at hurling our tops out of the string a long distance, yet so that they should be spinning when they came to a standstill. The best spinners always threw their tops with the pegs pointing away from the ground instead
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of towards it, which I could never achieve nor understand. Girls did it my way.
[For more info, check e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top.]
Cricket and football we had to organize between ourselves. Clapham Common was our ground. Mustering perhaps as many as eleven on paper we assumed a title as the — Cricket Club; we elected officers and committee; we bought a few necessities by subscription; we practised with considerable intervals of fooling and quarrelling; we even played a match or two with similar sides. Only on occasional inspired moments did we labour as if ours were the same game as was played by Abel, Bonnor, Spofforth, Lohmann, Quaife, S.M. J. Woods, Gunn, W. W. Read, Sharp, A. P. Wickham. I remember the strolling home, casting a stump now and then into the turf, or pausing to play "French cricket" of "tip and run’, better than I do the games. I much preferred football.
[NB Lohmann]
Later on we joined a football club and played matches with some regularity. Sometimes when the sodden ball was like lead it was but a sad pleasure and not that if in punting one kicked the ball full in one’s own face; but as a rule the full game, or any sort of game, or just kicking about till it was dark, was all I wanted.
In the class rooms history, geography, grammar, arithmetic, algebra, free-hand- drawing, handwriting, Latin, French, chemistry, or the avoiding of the same, took up about five hours a day for five days a week.
The one charm of the place was the temporary youth,
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a different one each week, who came over from a neighbouring training college to help the permanent master of each class. These students we looked upon as prey. In a few minutes the corporate brain of the class knew their victim thoroughly in so far as he concerned them, knew whether he need be obeyed, whether he could be both disobeyed and cheeked, whether he could also be mocked for some peculiarity of Manner or accent. Funniest of all was a Frenchman who said "What do they call you?" instead of "What is your name?"
The permanent masters were a strict sardonic one with ginger hair, a mild incalculable black-haired one with a ridiculously mild voice, and an altogether humorous one with bulging eyes and an amused unastonishable look who managed the top form with a smile. Then there was the head master, grey-bearded, spectacled, squat, and bandy-legged, but rapid. I remember him coming in once when the funniest boy in the class was amusing us all, the master being absent. He did not see the head entering the door behind him. He had a broad smile on his face when that devil from behind struck him hard on ear and cheek with his open palm, without a word. We who saw the blow coming were hardly more abashed and upset than Jack was. Our own master, the sardonic one, often caned Jack to his face. It was an unemotional ceremony. The master liked Jack but had to do it. Jack didn’t mind at all, and held out his hand smiling, with only the slightest twitch
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of his cheerful face at each blow. Jack was a strong, easy-going, kind-hearted dunce.
With him and various lean and fat, diligent and idle, and intermediate boys I did my lessons. I could learn anything easily and was seldom lower than fourth in the class, more often than not first, and had usually on one side of me a silent good boy. I who was never good at languages, least of all at Latin, sometimes knew more Latin than the master. The pleasure of being top, and nothing else, except the interest of my father, made me do such homework as I did in the evenings. We learnt Byron’s "Prisoner of Chillon". But I was in a period of prose which the place encouraged. I rattled off the lines I had committed to memory. The task endowed me only with the idea that it was possible for a man’s hair to grow white in a single night from sudden fear.
I remember the electric battery, the smell of the acids in the chemistry room, and the treacly look of sulphur melted, and shame of my only caning. It was but one stroke, for I was a sort of "good boy’, being shy, restrained, secretive, and never a leader, and with an _ expression quite superficially and accidentally resembling that of the virtuous. I passed some examination in chemistry but, as with other things, cared nothing for it, except for doing as well as most at it. For a while I played with magnets and amber, and rubbed the cat’s fur in the dark. My father made me attend evening lectures for a time on sound, light, and heat — with no effect.
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The midday hours when I had dinner at school, played in the playground or wandered about Battersea or visited boys' homes, and saw their pigeons, were a relief from no great servitude or labour. How I enjoyed the strongly spiced unusual soups and the sausages — and the sweets bought instead of food — and the pennies saved up and at last spent on a new pigeon. Then I had to pretend that I had won the pigeon in a raffle. Once or twice this was believed. I was found out because one day when I wanted to tell my parents that I had sixpence I bent over the front garden fence while my mother was gardening, and pretended to pick up the sixpence. Probably I was already suspected. My mother disbelieved the story. I confessed. My father spoke to me angrily. As I hated anger and blame, I became wretched.
The result was that very soon indeed afterwards my father came with a very sad but kind face in to the room where I sat alone and told me he was sure I should not do that sort of thing again. His shaking hands with me made me feel half hero, half saint. Naturally I did not do quite that sort of thing again. But the pleasure of coming home with a new pigeon was irresistible. The purchase excited me. Sometimes I took a fancy to a particular bird. Perhaps more often I had to have some bird — almost any bird at once. The shilling was in my pocket. I could not possibly go home in this condition. Then it was a pleasure to hold the legs between the two forefingers, the thumb and
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shorter fingers almost meeting over the body. You might have thought the bird was a divinely beautiful, immortal, or miraculous bird, had you known how the acquiring and the first possessing it thrilled me through and made me forget weather, time, meals, father and mother and native land. Every step towards the boy’s garden or the shop — a crowded fancier’s or a cornchandler’s with a couple of cages only in the doorway — gave me again the pleasure of anticipation and the pain of delay together.
I had no love to give Byron’s poetry, but, in the intervals of pigeon-keeping, I read avidly. On wet days and dark winter evenings I bolted scores of books by Mayne Reid. Fenimore Cooper was now much too dilatory. Henty was often beside the mark. Better even than Mayne Reid were some of the anonymous mixers of blood and thunder. I always retained at least an affectation of scorn for "Deadwood Dick" stories in particular, but not for the class to which they belonged.
I varied them, if it was a variation, with a never-ending serial entitled Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays and more improving things of the same kidney in the Boys' Own Paper. The Headless Horseman, The Scalp Hunters, The Boy Hunters of Kentucky, The Secret of Adam's Peak, are now but words to me, "Open Sesame" powerless to open more than a slit in the door behind which Indians, cowboys, and Mexican greasers mounted on fiery mustangs, armed with beautiful big guns, bows
[Deadwood Dick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood_Dick.]
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Fairy Know-a-bit; or, A nutshell of knowledge, by A.L.O.E. by Charlotte Maria Tucker https://archive.org/details/fairyknowabitor00tuckgoogbows and arrows, revolvers and bowie knives and lassoes, hunt, fight, and round up cattle night and day for ever and ever. While I read the books I polished up the silver falcon crest shield, which all of us wore on our caps, with mercury.
Could it have been now — it was certainly not much later — that I began to want to have back my Fairy Know-a-bit? It had been lent to some one in Lambeth, and through my vague recollections of it, mingled perhaps with a desire for what had departed, especially as it had been my own, it acquired a fantastic value, as that book about "The Key of Knowledge" had done; for several years I was always remembering it, pestering my father and mother to try to recover it.
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VI. PLAYFELLOWS AND SWINDON EXPERIENCES
I made a few friends at this school, rather among those who lived in our suburban neighbourhood than among Battersea boys. One boy I used to go home with to a public-house where we ate scones out of a glass-covered dish: but when I went home with other Battersea boys it was to see the pigeons and rabbits only; I was admitted to the garden by a side door and never entered the house. My aunt was shocked at my proposal to go to tea with a boy whose father kept a public-house, even a very large one.
On the whole they were a coarse rough lot, worse than the Board-school boys, or such was my opinion soon after I had left. Of my closer acquaintances only one lived very near us. We used to walk to school together almost daily. At this distance of time I recall but a single virtue that he possessed, that of perpetually laughing and scoffing, turning things and words round so that they could be laughed or scoffed at. He was puny and skinny, and his face was screwed up with quick Cockney malice and
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amusement. He had several sisters very much like him, always pattering and grinning. The family was a cheerful one, excellent at Christmas parties, just what our family was not: game was linked on to game and meal to meal with the utmost ease and jollity. I believe there were skeletons in the cupboard. Years afterwards my particular friend, to pay for racing and other pleasures, embezzled a large sum of money from his employers, and went first to prison and thence to a colony.
My other school friends lived farther away. I can scarcely recall more than their names and the streets they lived in. Two of them, brothers, reappear in my memory not at home but at Eastbourne, where it happened both our families were spending a summer holiday. Our lodgings were small and uncomfortable and indoors we were always squabbling or annoyed our father. Out of doors all was well. We loafed about listening to black minstrels who sang the songs of the day. We whistled the tunes till we sickened one another. We threw pebbles about. We ate as much nougat as we could afford. Every day we heard an old man with a rascally jaunty leer singing:
So, boys, keep away from the girls I say And give them plenty of room.
I think it was only against matrimony. We rarely bathed, because we could not afford bathing machines every day and we could not swim and had not incite
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ments to learn. The most strenuous thing we did was to walk up to the top of Beachy Head and then race the mile or more down into the town. The elder of the two brothers was by far the best runner. But as great as any of the joys of Eastbourne were the joys of looking forward and starting, and of returning and looking backward. How early I began to dislike the crowd and the conventions of the seaside it is impossible to say. Certain it is that the crowd on the beach and the constraint in our narrow lodgings had such an effect that I can recall practically no enjoyment in these earlier visits.
I try to guess why it was that I liked Charlie — , a dark-haired, tawny-skinned boy, whose family moved away to Norwich, or some such place, in the middle of our acquaintance. I can hear a common friend saying to me once, "You'll miss old Charlie — , won’t you’, but I cannot recover anything about the boy. And there are some dimmer, and others who are just faces with a certain expression which from time to time I recognise on the platforms at Victoria, Waterloo, and Clapham Junction.
Though I may have liked Eastbourne better than I think, I liked Swindon infinitely better than Eastbourne. Probably we were only two or three weeks by the sea, and then my next brother and I went to Swindon to finish out the holidays. For some good reason I preferred
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the sons of Swindon mechanics and labourers to the sons of Battersea tradesmen and clerks. I had forsaken the girls. With the boys I fished, played and rambled as before. When I was thirteen or thereabouts I was first introduced to a slaughterhouse. It backed on to the canal and had a disused door at that side with a broken panel imperfectly covered from within by a piece of sacking. Through this we peered, often to no purpose beyond sniffing the smell of blood and staleness, more rarely to see a carcass being cut up or the floor being washed out, three or four times to see a cow killed, or a calf, still jerking from the beam overhead, being flayed. The novelty drew me, and overpowered the horror and uncertain expectation which made my heart beat furiously and my lips go dry. A sort of broken-down half loafer, half drover, led in the cow. A rope round her neck was put through a hole in the doorpost and pulled tightly so that her head was low. The man held on to the rope-end with all his might.
The tall pale butcher came along, shoved her a little sideways to get her perfectly into position, and brought down the pointed knob of the poleaxe smartly upon her forehead. The rope was slackened, she fell heavily. The man thrust a cane into the opening in her forehead, "to stir the brains’, said my fellow watcher. The butcher cut her throat and the blood rattled into a bucket, while the man stood, with one foot on the ground clear of her gesticulating legs, and one upon her flank, working it up and down to help the blood
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out . . . . I always looked on with dread equal to my hope that there would be something to see. The silence alone made it endurable: the shrieking of a pig I never could have endured.
The only physical pain I could myself inflict with pleasure was upon fish. My usual bait for jack was a small living roach. By means of a tiny needle the line was threaded under about two inches of the fish’s skin, so that the big double hook lay close against its side and was not easily torn away by the act of casting the bait out to a distance of ten or twenty yards. Thus armed, the roach swam about to the best of its ability until it was seized by a jack or became so feeble as to be unattractive and useless. Now in order to damage the bait as little as possible I always used the utmost care to prick the skin only and not the fish in attaching the hook; when it was done for, either I threw it into the water to die slowly, or I destroyed it.
And there were several ways of destroying a little fish. For example, I could stamp it violently out of existence. Or I could break its head off. Gradually I found myself mildly enjoying the act of driving my thumb-nail through the neck or into the back in several places. The body quivered violently; but no sound was made, nor did the eyes express anything. If the root of the tail was squeezed hard between two finger-nails the quivering went on for a long time. Several times I forced the bladder out of the body. But these were isolated brief pleasures. I did nothing else of the sort. I never inten
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tionally tortured an animal, though I did protract the drowning of a cat by
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putting it into a copper that had not been quite filled: as I sat on the lid I sang street tunes very loudly to hide the sounds within and to keep up my courage. I hated having to kill a wounded pigeon. Nevertheless I did it, with a beating heart. When I killed my first snake — it was in reality a blindworm — I stabbed it so frenziedly that I was lucky not to hurt myself; the frenzy being due partly to suppressed fear, partly to the novelty.
As to fish, I very soon began to pride myself on killing what I caught instead of throwing it into the hedge behind, as the factory men usually did, there to die slowly. Pressing the under jaw of the jack against a stone I bent his long body up and over until his neck was broken and his back met his upper jaw. With a smaller fish I inserted the two first fingers into the gills and forced back the head until it was loose. I think that care and pride in doing this neatly and swiftly obliterated any mere pleasure in pain, though it was, I think, accompanied by a slight suffocation and beating of the heart and clouding of the brain.
There was a new game which I never cared about even on my first and last evening with its inventor. Known by the name of foxing, it meant following up lovers in our meadows and lurking behind hedges to watch them. Our leader had a spy-glass of some kind and seemed to think it worth his while. He apparently
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knew far more about the ways of girls than I had any chance of knowing or guessing. To me they were attractive but remote, forbidden, and, even so, inferior to boys and somehow incompatible with them. The ordinary Swindon games never had time to lose their flavour. The speech of the boys, the humming mellowness of it, the rolling t’s, the strange idioms and words, remained a half-conscious delight.
One day one boy said to another named Bacon who was losing his temper: "Simmer down, rasher’, and I was continually recalling and tasting the phrase and the accent and the boy’s look. These boys were regarded by my elders as below me. They were never invited to the house and, if they called, my grandmother affected a very comical look of ignorance as to who they were and what they wanted. Efforts were made to lure me away from them up to the schoolmaster’s house, where there were a boy and a girl of about my own age. They were all very well but tainted in my fancy with the dreary virtue of elders, so that I could never treat them quite seriously as playmates.
The atmosphere of the house was awful. The fact that the father was a head master was enough. It seemed inhuman that a head master should also be a parent, should concentrate upon two helpless children for hours together. Man and wife were entirely kind. But I remember his kind voice. I suppose it was a pure sham. And then the cake there! was it a regularly recurring accident or was it choice that brought on to
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the table at teatime what had been, or might have become, but was not, a cake? It was in crumbs and steaming hot. Once inside the mouth doubtless it was much the same as a true cake, but the revolted eyes always condemned the thing. Perhaps nothing in that house could have been right. For example, the pictures of hunted and dying stags by Landseer on the walls of one room were simply among the instruments of torture which we endured there, for about two hours, once or twice a year, for our parents' sake. But fishing was now the chief pleasure; the chief glory to come home with roach even no more than six inches long strung through their gills on a thorn stick with a crook. Whatever fish I brought home I as often as not scaled, gutted and fried myself, unless they were big enough to be worth my grandmother’s serious attention.
So long as it was not cold only the necessity of being in to a meal brought me away from the canal-side. Roach were good enough. Tench were the height of my ambition. When a fish kept biting gently without being hooked, as especially if the float dipped slantwise, I began to hope for a tench. This hope was better than catching roach. Time after time I threw out my line softly to this one spot until it was too dark to see the float. After a series of such evenings I caught my first tench. It was at the edge of the town, not in fact beyond the first bridge, through which nothing but fields were to be seen, but at a disused landing stage.
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The water here was much disturbed by ducks. But the position had this advantage — that I had behind me a street or a back-garden where I could run and hide if the water bailiff or "cut fellow" appeared. For I still fished without a licence.
And now, when I no longer needed his help at fishing, my uncle packed a box, had a man in to paint his name on it in large white letters, and when it had stood in the passage for a day or two, departed with it for South Africa. Home can have had little charm for him. He was tired of the same job, the nagging, one year after another; better pay and a new life lured him away. With a jaunty laugh deprecating my grandmother’s tears and blessings and my aunt’s fierce distress, with a sixpenny bit each for my brother and me, off he went, walking beside the man who wheeled his box to the station, a woman in a cap with her hands under her apron watching him from half the doorways in the street, he once or twice waving. It was said that were some girls who would have been sorry to see him going.
At home now my mother was nursing her sixth and last boy. I had known very well for some time that a baby was to come. I had been anxious for my mother, walking beside her with care lest she should trip at the kerbstone or over a skipping rope. She never said a word about what was approaching, though I dare say she knew that I knew. Then one night I heard a baby's
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crying. A little afterwards my father came upstairs, I think to get some sleep in my room. Finding me awake he spoke to me; and presently I said something about "the baby’, by which he learnt that I knew. It was the end of July. In a few days we were at Swindon out of the way.
After Wiltshire, I believe, a month or two had to elapse before we condescended again to Wimbledon. But Merton, at length rediscovered, was in some ways equal to Wiltshire. It was our very own. Henry, the pigeon-keeper, had a hand in the rediscovery. He used to talk about Cannon Hill, about an inn called the "George’, and so on, with more facts that convinced me this was the land I had slipped into on the day of the paper-chase. So finding my way back again I began an exploration of a couple of square miles of country which had never been completed. I learned to know it so well that Henry used to put it down to me when he found a rare nest robbed there. When I say rare, I mean anything more important than a thrush’s or blackbird’s nest. I was flattered when he said to some one: "Mr. Bloody Thomas has been there’. This must have been later. I had only just become a collector.
There were caterpillars on lime and poplar, sluggish mousy moths in the grass tufts, of our own suburban commons. To cherish the caterpillars and kill the moths with the fumes of crushed laurel leaves added something more to the zest of life. But as yet I had hardly
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taken my first bird’s egg, and for a year or two yet the chief merit of winter was that it provided materials for skating, sliding and snowballing.
Not that I was a good skater. I was even quite a bad slider, unable to avoid turning slowly round on a long slide and so ending with my face towards the start. Sledging suited me far better. When the snow was hard and not too deep I speedily laid a few boards on a pair of runners; and in an hour or two after the plan was made I was being pulled or pulling another over the snow to the tune of as many bells as could be had. It was a refinement to shoe the runners with strips of zinc, which, however, wore out in a few days.
This was glorious in the sun. But I think perhaps it was somehow better at night in the thick fog. People went about with lanterns and you could get lost, or if not you could pretend to, and stay out late. It was good also to belong to a search party and, perhaps, in spite of a lantern, turn out to be lost yourself or back at your starting place. Clapham Common on those foggy nights was in many ways like desert undiscovered country, yet perfectly harmless.
Even the way home from school held its adventures. There was, for instance, a fight with a schoolfellow who gave me once for all the felicity of holding him round the neck with one arm while I punched his face with the other.
More memorable still was the solitary adventure of ringing, not for the first time, the bell of the big house and being run down by the coachman. As he
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was the son of our greengrocer, an agile middle-aged respectable woman with long curls, I expected him to behave leniently. But he shut me up in a dark outhouse for two hours. I took my revenge. The place contained sacks of oats for the horses, and into these I put a number of steel pens, having first broken them so as to make two sharp stiff points. These, I firmly hoped, would ultimately destroy the horses belonging to my tormentor’s master. The hope gave me not only consolation, but a feeling of glory and power and evil as I at last hurried home to tea.
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VII. ANOTHER NEW SCHOOL
When I was about twelve I entered my fourth school as free scholar. The scholarship examination is a lively memory. All the competitors, about twice as many as there were places to be filled, were from my own school. The humming, ha-ing head master hovered about us, yet failed to see that one of us was cheating by very freely using a book. He was not a boy whom I should otherwise have feared, and in my eagerness to win I over-rode the customary objection to telling tales and, with a friend, I gave an account of the matter to the head. Both of us informers were elected to scholarships.
The boys at the new school resembled those at the private school. They were superficially more refined than those I had just parted from; their speech was better; their code of honour more strict; and there was an esprit de corps amongst them. The elder boys conducted themselves in a dignified manner, which I admired, apart from their skill at games or at the per
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formances of The School for Scandal and other plays at the end of the winter term. Cricket and football were organised. Two or three elevens played a succession of matches with neighbouring schools; and the practice was keen and regular. The very fights were decorous. A ring was made: the enemies fought decently, silently, and, to my judgement, with great skill.
The games were linked to the school work by the drill. Our drillmaster was a florid pompous old sergeant of impressive erectness and chest measurement. With a great voice and a little cane he compelled us to execute complicated marchings and stationary wavings of poles and dumb-bells. When one of the indoor masters joined him as a spectator the sergeant bent towards him, smiling from time to time with ineffably respectful superiority.
The head master was a serious high-minded incapable martinet with the boys, a meek husband to a stout, possibly imperious wife. This mistress of the head master was continually bursting into the school assemblies or the class-rooms to complain or to ask for an explanation of some breach of manners. A boy wearing the school cap had not doffed it to her in the street. The workmen about the place had complained of the bad language used by the boys. Her daughter had seen boys behaving rudely to one another. An un-industrious noise had been heard coming from a certain master’s classroom when he was known to be out.
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She shrieked; she panted; she introduced tears into her voice; she appealed to us as Englishmen, sons of gentlemen, scholars of "our school’. The head master or master bowed his head, gravely endeavouring to translate her tirade in a style at once moderate and pleasing to her; the boys assumed the frightful solemnity of those who dread to laugh. I remember her once present at an election of officers for the Second Eleven football club. A friend and I were rivals for one office, and after politely voting for one another, we were announced equal. The dear lady now raised her voice to give the casting vote to a young master who, she was certain, would not go wrong. I expect I need not say that I was not elected.
The head master had the fiercely sad attitude towards idleness and vice. He would have had us love virtue, yet could not make us love him. Praise of the classics in spite of their commercial uselessness was often on his lips, among boys who seldom got above hate of Caesar and Virgil. Though we all believed that he was a model of virtue he inspired us always with either fear or amusement. Many were the boys he caned in his study, which was near enough to give a certain class-room an envied distinction as an auditorium. He had a rapid, nasal, slightly Irving-ish speech, which was extraordinarily funny when he was trying to show the stages by which the Latin form of a word had passed into the French; funniest of all when he was mingling ordinary words
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(about leading the horse to the water but not being able to make him drink) with hums and ha’s at the annual prize-giving. He laughed with discomfort. His bearing was phenomenally erect, his square face bald except for a moustache that did not hide his thin lips.
The under-masters came and went, except one. He was a small cleanshaven, bluish- white-faced man, demurely grave in expression, whose breath had a sort of stale dryness that was not quite malodorous. He earned respect and obedience without fear from nearly all his class, by being a just, quiet, serious man, even of speech and kindly. Boys could not put him out or take him off his guard. His small exquisite legible handwriting must have been formed by annotating textbooks with a constant desire not to disgrace the printed page, and by admiration for Greek script. With slow wrinkling his stiff face relaxed now and then into a feminine tender smile. After a time I found myself frequently addressing him as "Father", so naturally did he touch the gentle docile side of me. The one time I ever cried in school was when he blamed me with a severity that seemed to hurt him. He awarded me prizes for essays on the Sicilian Expedition and on Imperial Federation, which I had taken pains with and was proud of. I had a grandiloquent turn. But the master had no insight or no time to exercise it. He had only a momentary power over me, not an influence. Neither a goal
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nor a love of work could he give me. When I saw him approaching with quick short steps and "downcast eyes demure" in his soft hat and cape, I laughed inwardly.
Through him I became accustomed to the first book of the Aeneid, to Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV and V. To me they remained prose rendered obscure and tedious, in the one case by foreign language, and in the other by archaisms, inversions and other unfamiliar and as yet impotent forms. Often they were worse than obscure. The passages that stuck fast in the ruts which they wore in our brains were bandied about for their comicality. "All became silent’, "The strawberry grows beneath the nettle’, "By thinking on the frosty Caucasus’, "Tennis balls, my liege’, and other phrases had to be uttered with a grin and received with a grin. Possibly the master cared nothing for poetry: or he may have despaired of communicating to us anything but a dead knowledge of words. If I remember rightly, the music of Virgil’s hexameters never at the time fell on my ears, whether or not I was capable of knowing it for music. The snake attacking Laocoon and his children was the one vivid thing contributed by those months.
Shakespeare meant rather more. He helped me to faint apprehension of certain human heights and depths, as in Henry V’s ardour and Richard II’s dejection; the energy in "Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war" wakened in me the elements of acting and adventure. Blank verse I regarded as a form of prose, licen
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tious in construction and divided wantonly into lines as if it were poetry.
My father probably went over the plays with me when I was doing my home-work, but his taste was for directly elevating philanthropic and progressive literature. Or was it only with a view to inspiring a love of virtue that he read "Abou Ben Adhem" and how he "loved his fellow men’? I learnt to recite it myself with a lofty histrionic thrill. Its real effect was equal to that of the gilt "Faith’, "Hope" and "Charity" in the Unitarian Chapel. These words = and Shakespeare’s plays and Leigh Hunt’s poem did help me to feel that there was something for men besides eating and drinking and getting a living or having it got for you.
But at this period "good’, so far as it concerned the world and not me personally, meant chiefly if not solely Liberalism. Through my father’s enthusiastic political talk I learnt that Mr. Gladstone was a glorious, great and good man, greater than Robert Abel. Any Liberal candidate who ventured upon our constituency was, though in a lesser degree, glorious, great and good. I used to distribute handbills of political meetings in the cause, sang a Liberal parody of the "Men of Harlech’, and followed the elections as keenly as I did cricket scores. Conservatives I thought were an inferior race, partly because they were wicked, partly because they were stupid. There ought never to be any Conservatives; and as time went on they would become fewer and fewer
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and at last all would be well. Until then Liberals had to fight to rescue the downtrodden in Ireland, in London slums and elsewhere; and the Conservatives, indifferent to pain and suffering, ambitious to drink beer with no interruptions except from war, had to be attacked.
I used to go with my father to the Washington Music-hall on Sunday evenings and hear John Burns, Keir Hardie, and the Socialists. Once there I saw Michael Davitt standing by an iron pillar, dark, straight, and austere with his armless sleeve dangling. I think I knew that he had just come out of prison, and this probably helped him to a place in my mind with the Pathfinder and Milton’s Satan. John Burns was another glorious, great and good man. I honestly admired his look and voice and was proud to
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[http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Battersea.htm The Battersea Palace, 32 York Road, Battersea, London — formerly The Washington Music Hall, Battersea Empire etc etc]
shake hands with him and also to have my muddle stump bowled clean out of the ground by him once on Clapham Common. On the contrary, what a ridiculous creature was our Conservative member on his horse, just a rich gentleman who had once been an athlete but could not make a speech as my father could; and his coachman was frequently drunk or half-drunk or not sober or had been drinking or looked like it.
Poetry was nothing to me compared with Home Rule. Or rather Home Rule took the place of Poetry, and was really an equivalent in so far as it lifted me to vaguely magnificent ideas of good and evil. It was on the same level as the signing of Magna Charta, the
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Dissolution of the Monasteries, the beheading of Charles I and dethronement of James II, which to me were splendid Liberal events of the past. Some kind of sense of this splendour gave part of the thrill to my voice when I recited before an adult audience at the chapel:
Ring out the old, ring in the new. Ring out the false, ring in the true. The year is dying, let him die.
I was sufficiently stirred by the Home Rule election to declare myself Liberal at school in a form which I think was three-quarters Conservative.
My enthusiasm pleased my father. It must have atoned for my peculiarities and for my bad language among my schoolfellows.
This vice was reported to my mother by Henry, who had teased and tormented me one day on the Common and drawn from my lips every filthy word I could muster. I denied the fact passionately and when I saw that my mother did not believe me I gave way and passionately repented. Home life was very largely grumbling, deceiving and repenting, driving my father to anger or sorrow and then being miserable consequently. I stayed out late, or I was unwilling to go to chapel, or I told lies, or I talked nonsense at the Sunday dinner-table. It was almost the only meal as a rule which the whole family had together. There was plenty to eat of the best things known to my mother, such as boiled mutton and caper-sauce,
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with carrots and turnips, followed by apple tart and custard. Nor did my father despise these things. But he wanted us to talk about the sermon. For I think very often he himself only went to the evening service. We had hated hearing the sermon and now had to improvise an essay on it. It was so loathsome that I could never seriously attempt the task, even to avert the Sunday dinner anger, which became almost a regular thing. Either I showed my loathing too openly or I caught one of my brothers' eyes and one or another and then both tittered. My father reprimanded us by calling us "donkeys’. I made an effort, but his anger and my shame only made me duller than ever. Probably I broke down in the middle of a sentence with, "Oh, I don’t know." Then came a lecture from my father, or just a few words of abuse, and then all remained silent for a time. Some days my father, relenting, would choose what he thought a lighter pleasanter subject; everyone would be absurdly eager to keep it going, and my father absurdly pleased with trifles. On other days one of my smaller brothers would let out a titter; another did the same; I felt and looked enormously sad, perhaps too sad. Then one would be sent out of the room, to be followed presently at my mother’s request by his plateful of dinner.
We had very few visitors, none to turn us inside out. Once a lady and a daughter, remote cousins or friends of friends, came, and the girl left me with a yearning
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heart for some days and a curiosity for years like my curiosity about the lost childish books. Christmas was eagerly waited for, but the day itself meant chiefly watching for the postman, disappointment, chapel, a heavy dinner and crackers, some squabbling comparison of our presents, tea . . . . supper . . . . I think I had always an eager haste to unveil the mystery, always a fluttering look of wonder which always sank dead like an extinguished torch into disgust with the imperfect thing. If it had only been something better or different. It mattered not how many or good were my presents: they fell below an indefinite imagined standard. If they were simply below last year’s it was worse.
The disappointment is vivid yet of the Christmas day when the postman arrived at last, hours late, and brought me only a long narrow box of crackers. We children gave no presents to one another or to our parents: we were content to send out a few picture cards paid for by our parents, to people who would send us cards. The faculty for ceremony and festival was not in any of us.
Our boy friends seldom came to the house. Nor were we very anxious that they should, knowing that we should be constrained by the presence of father or mother. For we had one way at home, another abroad. But at the new school I made several friends. There were the boys I sat next to in class, and the other members of the football team. One of these named George lived a hundred yards away from us. Every morning he
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came whistling past the house for me to join him on the way to school, and he was fairly often in the house. He had a Grecian nose which he had learnt to be proud of, and carried himself carefully, partly because he valued his appearance, partly because a London" Scottish volunteer of superb appearance was courting his sister. This Scot was his hero: he never tired of telling me the man’s measurements and how you could strike him as hard as you liked on the chest. Politeness to women, seemliness of speech and behaviour, were among his daily ideals. Being more skilful than I and keen to excel, he took a patronizing but genuine interest in my football play, and blamed my slackness. In politics he was a thoroughgoing Conservative. Our intercourse was long, regular, always superficial. He was cold and hard and never came out into the country with me or kept pets. I think we always talked about games and school affairs. At least I know that though we continued to be close neighbours I hardly ever even spoke to him six meeting him and having unavoidably to stop and exchange words.
I was far more intimate with a boy of something like my own nature. As a girl he would have been beautiful, with his plump dimpled cheeks, delicate rosy skin, Cupid lips, perfect features, fine light brown hair, soft grey eyes, smiling timorous expression, head slightly bent. But he had thin legs; he was easily frightened; he
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played games slackly and awkwardly. We sat together at school. He was always drawing, chiefly faces in profile. I remember his sleek tender way of touching the paper. Pointing out the faults, he drew me. I admired his face as I did my mother’s, and envied them both, and became intensely conscious of my appearance. I used to look at myself in a glass, with eyes for the faults, the coarse nose, the weak chin, the underlip too much behind the upper, the ear without a lobe; always retaining a sort of belief that the faults were not the whole. This boy and I, presuming on our position at or near the top of the class, laughed endlessly in class during lessons, which caused us often to be reprimanded or separated. He lived two miles from us and was never at the house.
I remember other boys with whom my whole intercourse seems to have been exchanging endless jokes, playing football together, and in summer eating ices together bought at the Italian stall outside the school. One boy I remember through one incident only. We were being examined in the De Bello Gallico, and he was shamelessly using his copy of the text. I told him to shut it up and when he refused I loaded my pen and discharged the ink over his shoulder on to the book. Then, because his sister was engaged to the master, he had the effrontery to go and complain, thus compelling me to give him away. Another boy I can still see playing back with me in the football field. He was a sturdy
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energetic boy with a Roman nose in a freckled red laughing face. Probably he was a year or two older than I, and knew boys and young men older than himself, and the lore he had learned from them used to impress me. One story he told was of a Spanish girl who bit her lover’s chest, one of a man being set upon among the Welsh hills by factory girls and shamefully handled. Others were of the same class. These things he spoke of, as it appeared to me, without indecency. I thought him chivalrous and frank and manly. In fact I had a great respect for him, and after I had left the school I used to wish we could meet again. Several older boys with physical prowess and masterful confident bearing won my admiration.
Other boys I see at some one cardinal moment. One was the idiot of the school, a pale fat round-featured being who talked through his nose and could be persuaded to sit upon a round stone like a hen upon an egg till he was called off. Another, a short square-shouldered boy, lean, pale and square-jawed, with almost waxen hair, screamed like a wild beast on having a window shut hard on his fingers. A third was a leering dark fattish boy whose time went to girls instead of games. His nickname among his admirers and affected despisers was Sally. According to rumour, founded chiefly on his own boastful shameless narratives, his conquests were many and complete. And for a time he stirred me to imitate him. I singled out the most
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notorious of his alleged paramours, a pale slender black-haired girl several years older than myself, with small features and round dark eyes and a light name that seemed perfectly appropriate, and for some days or weeks pursued her. By day I walked after her at a distance without ever catching her up; I managed to meet her face to face without daring to speak. By night I would say as much as good evening and silently walk alongside her and perhaps her tittering younger sister. My desire was to be with her, to be intimate with her in some unknown degree. In truth, I think I wished to be loved by her. I should have liked to kiss her. I ceased to believe what I had heard Sally tell about her. For many nights I hung outside her house watching the blinds for her shadow and the door for herself, slipping away to a distance if she appeared and only showing myself reluctantly. On this starvation diet of neither encouragement nor rude words my affection died utterly away. The girl herself was but a chance object, or chosen because I had begun by imagining she would meet me half-way. Even while I was after her I was thinking also of another girl, a friend of hers, actually the Mabel of my childhood. Perhaps she had forgotten me; she certainly allowed no rights to the old attachment. Though she smiled to me once from between two others, she passed on. The dark girl speaking of her had said something which made me conceive a faint hope, but we were never to be friends again, and
[Mabel again!]
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since then I seem never to have seen her. There was a very faintly mysterious sentiment in my thought of her which made me shy of being friendly, as I had a chance of becoming on the football field, with one of her brothers. For a year afterwards I paid little attention to girls. Sally became a distant acquaintance. The boys who came up with me from the old school remained friendly. The most friendly of all left for a Yorkshire town before the first year was out. Another used to walk with me occasionally in the bird-nesting season. Being from Battersea he could regale me with slang terms of abuse, such as "Blinking potherb’. His father, a Liberal, had taught him a poor opinion of the ancients. The Greeks in his opinion must have been poor runners to have dropped dead in their races. I, however, respected the Greeks, believing where I could not prove.
I had not many friends among the cleverer footballers and cricketers. I think I still preferred chases and fighting games such as I played years before. There were now more violent affrays. The fighters were armed with singlesticks but no masks, and they gave and took good blows before their forts among the gorse bushes were lost and gained. Thus in one of them I and another boy had a long serious duel, until I had my upper lip split and a front tooth or, as I thought at the time, all my teeth, knocked out, thus suffering a slight disfigurement which added to the sorrows of the
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mirror. My one satisfaction after the incident was the doctor’s compliment when I bore the stitching up without noise. Very few of my tears and glooms at that age were caused by physical pain, unless it was toothache. When I lost my teeth at the dentist’s it was with ostentatious fortitude, encouraged by my father's praises.
Both at football and cricket I was good only on rare occasions. There were days when I could shoot a goal from corner and do almost anything I wanted to. There was one day at least when bowling a boy out with my first ball after school gave me a happy irresistible feeling, so that with dangerously fast balls I took several wickets running. And somehow, I suppose through quiet exercise of my will to prevail, I was usually after a time elected to some office in the second eleven. As vice-captain I went up to London with another boy to buy a set of goal-posts in Cheapside. As I said before, my pride in conducting the expedition is all I can remember of what I know was an adventure.
I was not better than anyone else at running, jumping, or swimming. In the sports I entered only for the walking and the swimming race. As I never learnt to dive I had to jump in, and arrived last in the swimming race. But I fancied myself at walking; and John and George had spread reports about my performances and I started at scratch with a dozen boys in front of me. All of them were behind in a quarter of a mile or so, except one, and him I was just passing. His five yards'
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start had all along seemed to me unfair. However, he was done with; so was the boy who notoriously ran. But their footsteps and their panting sounded close behind, I had enjoyed catching up and walking through the others. Still more I hated being pursued. Soon after George began to run beside me, and when I was within a hundred yards of the tape, I began to believe that the running boy was gaining on me. I could not stand it. Turning off the track I threw myself down on the grass on the pretext that I had a stitch. A master came up and looked at me, saying they had expected me to win. I was wretched. The only worse thing possible was to have been beaten. But nobody else thought so. My father blamed me for cowardice, and for years after used to say to me at intervals on various occasions: "Ah well, it’s no use, I suppose. It’s just that mile race over again."
"Half-mile," said I: it was the only answer. Secretly I was as well pleased with the tragic singularity as I could have been with victory. Moreover, I always firmly believed that no boy could beat me in fair walking without a crowd.
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VII. BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND PIGEONS
I was soon all but indifferent to games. When I entered the school I was an entomologist who had specimens of the yellow underwing and the magpie and the common white butterfly. It may have been a year later that I met a boy who made me ashamed of this ignorance, and helped to set me on another path out of doors. Hearing that he had a collection of moths and butterflies and was selling his duplicates and charging one penny for a swallow-tail, I ordered one. I expected the majestic swallow-tail butterfly. What came was the almost untailed mediocre moth. I handed over the penny without a murmur, for fear of betraying my ignorance. I do not know how we became intimate in spite of this. John was a handsome fair boy, delicate complexioned, dimpled at cheek and chin, of regular large features, strong but not a cricketer or footballer, and for that reason an object of some slight degree of contempt from me and far more from George. George, in fact, mistaking for girlishness
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John’s delicate skin and better manners, warned me against him. For a time I hesitated between the two. Or it is more truthful to say that I receded slowly away from George to John? Henceforward I merely had George for company to school: with John I spent many evenings and most of my half-holidays. I was more at his house than he at ours. His was larger and we were perfectly free there: also I had some shame of our slightly inferior social position or what I believed to be such, for his speech seemed to me more refined, his manner was freer and more generous than mine, his elder brother was at a great public school, and wore a silk hat on Sundays, he had more money to spend, several of his relatives lived in great big houses.
Indoors and here and there in Surrey I rapidly learnt the names and seasons of most common moths and butterflies. I learnt to catch and kill and display them in the orthodox manner. To acquire all the tools of the trade I begged from my father and mother and bartered with everyone. The little round pill boxes made of thin wooden chips, of three or four different sizes one within the other, delighted me as a novelty: so did the neat cork-lined boxes that closed so softly and tightly . . . . and everything else in turn. I was in a terrible hurry to be abreast with John. To spend and to get were the things. An ancient glass case of moths and decoratively mingled butterflies in a second-hand shop seemed the most desirable thing in the world — till I had paid for it and
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opened it and saw that all the specimens were only so much coloured dust, and faded at that. What I could not catch at once I must buy from John or from a wonderful "naturalist" at a shop. At intervals too I made my own necessaries, fitting a lining of cork into boxes and covering it with white paper, and so on, too hastily to do it well, yet learning or educating some degree of lightness and skilfulness with the fingers.
In the summer evenings we searched gardens and shrubberies for moths and caterpillars.
On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons now we used to go to Wimbledon Common. Or if we had a whole holiday we took a train to Barnes station and walked through Richmond Park over Ham Common to One Tree or Teddington lock, to fish in the Thames. For I was very soon far from being a stern-spirited collector out of doors. I might go out with nothing in view except butterflies, but the moving to and fro among quiet places in the warm weather was the substantial part of the pleasure.
Fishing after a time was more to my taste. The infinite possibilities of a river containing pike, barbell and trout fascinated me; I liked the silence; failure never bored me, but on the contrary the last minutes of fading light were intensely exciting. I think I was usually the most impatient of conversation or other interruption, the last to give way under steady lack of incident. When we did give way we used to try casting our lines to the farthest possible distance, or we
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kept pretending to have bites and struck ferociously so that our lines flew up high into the air, or we used ridiculous baits, until at last our tackles became entangled, or one lost his temper, sulkily packed up and went off alone, to wait, however, at no long distance.
We had no great success in the Thames. The most alluring thing that ever happened to me there was hooking a fish of inestimable size which got away with my hook in its mouth. But the walk there and back was never tiring. On the outward journey I think expectation would have carried me through nothing but streets: the long turf stretches of Richmond Park broken by ponds and copses and islanded by great single trees and clusters were pure additional delight as we talked of the chances of sport or weather or whistled the current popular songs.
The little rustic cottages at Ham Common beyond, and the very old man sitting outside one of them were always a welcome sight. The broad green-edged river and the swans were enough to fill my eyes for six or seven hours on end, with an interval for bread, cheese, apples and ginger beer. The men towing pleasure boats and brushing down the riverside grass and bushes with their ropes were the only nuisance. Going home we filled our creels and pockets, in the season, with horse chestnuts from wayside trees. As I remember having half a dozen different companions on these expeditions I believe that others found it more dull.
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John and I talked endlessly about our sport and about the implements, of which we got, with every obtainable penny, far more than it was necessary or even possible to use, and about the extraordinary catches recorded in the fishing books and newspapers. Politics we tried not to touch because John was a staunch Conservative. He was, however, less firm as a churchman and I experienced some of my first (and last) pride of argument in impugning the immortality and even the existence of the soul. At this moment I know the place where I proved it impossible that man should have a soul unless the animals had one also, or rather that if he had one he had acquired it on the upward course of evolution. Having read Darwin’s Descent of Man I was sure that men were but animals advanced by exceptional stages from a common level with other animals. At what moment then, said I to John, had the soul entered man? We were walking with great strides along Northcote Road in the gaslight, carrying bags of seed for our pigeons. I thought myself a discoverer and was much elated at being unanswerable except out of the Bible, a work of men, in some ways ignorant men. Yet as I was not interested in the soul except out of dislike for religious people who talked about it, I did not inquire further. This intellectual level was not one which we frequented. Personal talk was, of course, our staple, discussing the abilities and pretensions of other boys, laughing over such follies as that of the boy who
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assured us that he knew "a nest of Red Admiral butterflies" at Wimbledon — this picturesque technical slip we continually brought up for ridicule. We were not inventive boys. At most perhaps for the sake of vividness or glory we would relate an experience we had heard of and claim it for our own. I remember pretending to have seen a naked girl in a copse near Swindon. Of my grandmother’s cottage I used to speak as if it were the same rank as the houses of John’s uncles and aunts. I was guilty of no single great untruth or calculated misrepresentation, but I spoke of the ivy on the cottage walls with a desire that it should be understood to be a considerable mass and expanse, and of leaning out of my bedroom window to reach a nest as if there were a respectable number of other windows, instead of only three altogether. My comparatively wealthy distant relations were not omitted from the picture which I was creating. If my cousins at the Herefordshire vicarage had a donkey or a pony to ride, I took the liberty of referring to their horses and stables. And, of course, when I heard that my uncle had taken part in the fighting against Lobengula and the Matabele, I magnified the splendour which I really conceived: I had always been careful to speak of him as an engineer not as a fitter. It was easy for me to slip into a course of lying. Thus I once suffered from constipation and my mother knew of it; but for a day or two afterwards I asserted, when asked, that I was still suffering.
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I did not, however, dream of throwing up the companions whom I did not want to introduce John to. For example, I always went out if possible to Henry’s whistle. Other boys who had met me with him had referred scornfully to Henry. Jonathan had asked me, "Who was that low-bred fellow you were with?" But then Jonathan had very subtle rules of gentility. Once he met me while I was at my third school and he also left the school we had attended together, and on hearing where I now went he remarked, "Oh, that is quite a cad’s school." I liked to feel the equals of these squeamish boys without looking down except in temporarily affected contempt on their inferiors. So I used to enjoy going about with Henry to look at the pigeon shops in Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham, occasionally to visit the back-garden lofts of working men in the same neighbourhoods. He had me in tow and I think I remained for the most part silent in the background unless I had a bird to buy. These long rambles among crowds of working people under the gaslight, in all sorts of weathers, were a great pleasure and were interrupted by a greater one when we stood and looked at pigeons in an atmosphere of shag smoke, grain and birds. At one time I paid a good many visits to the lofts of a tradesman in our neigbourhood, a tall gross pale-faced dark man with a truculent geniality. He was said to ill-treat the small wife who did most of the shop work and to be going under an assumed name for some bad
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reason. John would never have endured him: if he had to deal with men below him he preferred gamekeepers and such like who had to be tipped and knew their place. But the man kept scores of long-distance homing pigeons.
Their high circlings visible from our back garden, and their rushing lower flight between the chimney-pots, were sublime to me. It was a great day therefore when I went round to him to get the pair of young black chequers which I had been awaiting for many days. I was to have them, so I understood, for two-and-six the pair. When I already had them in my hands I learnt that they were two-and-six each. This was beyond my means, nor did I want to have one of them at such a price. So he took them back into his hands at the door. Then while I was still lingering he put the head of one bird in his mouth, as I imagined in fun, or to slip a grain into its beak. His teeth closed on the slender neck tighter and tighter, the wings flapped and quivered, and when he opened his jaws the bird was dead. I was speechless, on the edge of tears. He looked down at me with a half-pitying grin, remarking that I was "still soft-hearted’. My tenderness turned to hatred for the man, yet I could not speak. I dared not show my feeling. With only a meek resentfulness I even accepted his gift of the surviving bird. It became the prize of my pigeon house, always distinguished as "the young homer’. The man I never did more than nod to again.
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It was Henry, too, who introduced me to much better company, a family with half a dozen boys who let him keep his main store of pigeons in their back garden. An unlocked side door admitted the most distant connections of the Joneses or of their friends to the back garden. It was practically never without some of the boys and their friends or hangers-on, their dogs, their pigeons or Henry’s. The house itself was scarcely more sacred. The boys' rooms, and dark library lined with books and littered with magazines and newspapers, were freely invaded. The elder boys, who went neither to school nor to work, were always indoors or in the garden when they were not training for athletic sports. The younger boys were licensed truants, getting to bed or to breakfast at all hours. The father, an unemployed mysterious professional man with a long coat and a cigar, looked dubiously cheerful, reigning rather than ruling, but treated with respectful familiarity. Mrs. Jones, sadly tolerant, was busy chiefly indoors.
The chief attraction for me was the family collection of birds' eggs from the moorland and seashore of Wales. The curlew, the hen-harrier, the buzzard, belonged to a past which to me was romantic. For the present they had to be contented with the fields and copses of Merton for a hunting ground. I was free to go in and out of the house and garden, a very humble follower and admirer of their free idle ways. One of them taught me to ride a bicycle. Sometimes
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one joined me in a walk to Merton. For a wet or an unoccupied afternoon I had the garden and the roomy pigeon house, only a few minutes' walk from home, as an easy resource. But John never went there with me, nor did any of my other school friends. I was not intimate with any of the boys. In fact John was my one constant friend. We had become essential to one another. We quarrelled and differed, of course, but one quarrel only lasted in my memory and that because John sent me a note next morning at school, saying: "I was a cad. Will you make it up?" I kept the paper for years afterwards.
I did not make friends easily, perhaps because I was exacting. I wanted someone who would be ever ready for an afternoon and evening of walking or talking, and I think I wanted to have the upper hand and to have it easily. With me, to think of a walk to Merton or a tour among the shops in Battersea meant to do it immediately, and I could usually get John to accompany me. So we were separated hardly at all except in the holidays.
I remember the summer holiday when I was fourteen. My two next brothers and I spent two or three weeks with four boys and a girl whom my mother’s sister was looking after during their parents' absence in India. We took the train journey alone, enjoying most the change at Templecombe and the wait which we spent in hunting butterflies near the station. It was at
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Burnham in Somerset that we stayed. The eldest boy was entering Sandhurst, the next two were at the public school which he had just left. They were comparatively wealthy people and their ways were different from ours or even John’s family. My aunt was careful to instruct us in the use of fish knives. The boys' slang delighted and impressed me. But I made no friends among them. My next brother, a franker, more athletic boy, was the favourite, and was often mildly in league with them against me. The eldest boy despised me. He made me conscious of being shy, timid and sneaking; and, if I was naturally that, I must have been far more so among people whom I could not be free with, partly at least because I was so anxious not to show my more awkward manners and all that they betokened.
Nevertheless I had many pleasures there. I began to learn to swim in the sea. I chased the clouded yellow butterflies which I now saw for the first time, among the sandhills. I fished with the others out in the mud flats at a river mouth, above all in a big pond inland, a long pond, with a margin downtrodden by bathers and others at one end, but a steeper bushy bank overshadowed by trees in places at the other. Here I caught eels and perch, and one day pulled to the very edge, and then lost, the biggest perch I had ever seen. After this excitement I should have been content to spend all my days bedside this pond. But the other boys drew me with them half unwillingly on other expeditions, inland, or along the
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shore, or in boats. When we quitted the pond at evening we had sport out of a big deserted house by throwing stones at the surviving window-panes.
My next brother stayed on a week or so after I left these people for Swindon. There I was delighted to find the clouded yellow butterflies as plentiful as by the sea. I gave more time to butterflies in those weeks because I had now made friends with a Swindon boy who was very little of a fisherman. We chased the butterflies; we jumped the narrow brooks; we trespassed hither and thither with a St. Bernard puppy who drew after us all the cattle in the fields and provoked the farmer; we sat talking in the crown of a pollard willow.
Fred was something of an athlete and we ran and jumped in friendly rivalry in the fields. I could beat him only at walking. I never met the boy of anything like my own age whom I could not beat at walking. So I stamped the dust furiously from one milestone to another towards Wootton Bassett in the hope of some day covering the mile in less than seven minutes. Also as I now had an old bicycle with me, we raced on bicycles. The great feats of the big boys at his school were always on my companion’s lips. But in spite of all this, I made a poor show when next I had a chance of using my fists. Two of Fred’s schoolfellows were now pursuing the dark bushy-haired girl whom I used to walk about with. In fact, I am not sure that pursuit was necessary. However it was, I jeered at her, and one of them was
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keen for a quarrel.
One day as I stood fishing alone, with Fred somewhere in the field behind, hidden by the canal-side hedge, this boy came up beside me. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, put himself in attitudes of offence and defense, clenched his fist close to my face, taunted me, did everything but strike me. He was a smaller boy than I, active, stout and ruddy, and at that time as fiery as I was cold. I do not think I was afraid of him, but I certainly was not ready to fight. I wanted to fish; I was in the wrong; Fred in the background, at least as much his friend as mine, added to my discomfort. During the whole scene I do not think I took my eyes off my float or ceased to hold out my rod horizontally.
In the end my enemy left me to enjoy my shame. Fred came up from behind the hedge, and I made my explanations. The fact is that, not having been prepared for a quarrel, I could not get free enough from thought about the whole affair and the circumstances of the moment to fight. Thenceforward I never fought, never once pitted my strength, skill and courage seriously against an opponent. I boxed very little, I toyed with singlesticks and foils, only once or twice did I wrestle with John until I fell on him or under him.
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IX. A LASTING ACQUAINTANCE: RICHARD JEFFERIES
When Fred was not free I had some very different company. One acquaintance I had made at Swindon was a stout coarse lad of fifteen or sixteen who had been in prison and had plenty of spare time. His name also was Fred. He would do almost anything to please me, from fishing with me all day, to killing a neighbour’s cat for me to skin. Moreover, he always behaved to me with the utmost decency, faith and honesty. I only surmised that he was not a saint. The report that he had been in prison was against him; and there was another thing. Sometimes a big half-witted tousled girl and a young sister used to pass us on the canal-side, and one day I and Fred, who knew them, rambled about with them in the gorse, I looking for late linnets' nests, Fred frequently importuning the elder girl but with no success.
But a more entertaining and lasting acquaintance was an old man whom I called Dad, in the Wiltshire style, almost from the first day. I remember him first as a
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stiff straight man, broad-shouldered and bushy bearded, holding his rod out and watching his float very intently. Suddenly up went the rod and a little roach flew high over his head into the hedge behind. "Daddy bin and caught one!" shouted the boy with me. We laughed and the old man laughed too. As every day he fished not far from me and Fred or whoever was my companion, we began to chat. We used to sit and eat our dinner together. He being toothless had to chew prodigiously, his nose and his beard almost meeting at each bite, to get through his brown bread and watercress. The bread he brought with him, the watercress he gathered from the brooks. His eating grimace amused me, his gravity, the simplicity of the meal, and his thanks to God for it impressed me. At that time he lived with his wife under the roof of a son who was in the factory. The rod and half a loaf helped him to fill up his time with obvious satisfaction, and what he caught he kept, however small. Very soon I sought him out and got him to walk with me when I was tired of fishing. I shared my doughy cake with him, or if we had a meal at a village shop I paid for the tea and bread and butter and egg and lardy cake. He knew the names of most birds and could imitate their cries: his imitations of the jackdaw calling his name, and of the young rook crying and swallowing a worm at the same time, were wonderful. The flowers, too, he knew, both the common pretty flowers and those whose virtues he had read of in Culpeper’s
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Herbal. With dried and powdered dock root and with extracts of leaves, flowers or bark, he composed dark medicinal-looking draughts. His ointment made of lard scented with elder flower was delicious. Then he had a way with country people. He spoke to everyone. All the old men to him were "Dad" and the old women "Granny and the younger men "young man’. He would stop by a stone-breaker to say, "How many ups and downs o" that to a pound of mutton, young man?" The pity was that he was too poor to get friendly with keepers. If we were caught trespassing he was no good. Out we had to go, the old man muttering, "We beant poaching’, and the keeper retorting, "Looks very much like it wi" they thick sticks." He was a much better hand with the labourers and especially the women with whom he had an ineffably grave knowing manner, many times they gave us tea and an egg which the fowl had just laid in the cupboard; and the son would tell us perhaps where there was a magpie’s nest. The only man he seemed to feel himself above was the yellow half-bred gypsy youth, the "diddikai’, who used to slouch by us sometimes. Dad had done some poaching in his younger days. Odd-job man under a wood-ward, militiaman, and latterly outdoor assistant to grocers, he had not had time to become very respectable. So he was the first man old enough to be my grandfather with whom I was on thoroughly good easy terms. He did not hide anything or invent a moral code for my
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benefit. He would say of the round- shouldered sour man living alone in the sham-Gothic house with the orchard, "It’s the women has put old Dicky’s back up’, and leave me to make what I could of it. Or he shook his head solemnly as he saw the once decent middle aged gaffer from the works going up the canal-side with an obvious loose woman and later on emerging from the ash copse. It merely amused me. Sex was alluring and amusing, whenever it was revealed, because the whole grown-up world for the benefit of the young was endeavouring to keep up the appearance of doing without sex. Thus Dad’s extraordinary freedom was equally amusing and alluring. At first I supposed him to be a wicked old man until I came to believe that all men were radically like him but most of them inferior in honesty. He was not in the least unseemly or obtrusive, but grave and roused very rarely to his Shakespearian laughter and the words, "Well, well, what a thing it is!" Nor did he ever use foul language. What is more, he spoke what he thought, whether his sons, or anyone else such as myself, were there, which was very new to me. I had always had an idea that either parents were not of the same weak flesh as children or that they were religiously obliged to conceal the same: John who had seen his father’s nakedness had committed a sort of sin. These three sons of Dad’s treated him as an equal, but in misfortune. I got to know them also. The middle one with whom he lived
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used to fish in the evenings in a more business-like way. He could not, however, resist a shot with a catapult at any rat swimming across at a convenient distance. Once he drove a large bullet clean through a rat, and of course I had to have a catapult of the same strength. The eldest son was a bad old Indian soldier often out of a job. The youngest was a rambling character. I sometimes saw him as brown as a berry from harvesting, his large blue eyes glittering, his fair hair bleached like hay. As they were all friendly I had rather, if I had to be indoors, be with them than with my grandmother.
John meantime had covered himself with glory by catching a jack of eight pounds somewhere in Kent. Nevertheless we did not break our custom of not fishing in autumn or winter. Whenever I was not bound to play in a football match I spent my half-holidays with John, walking, to Merton or Wimbledon, or taking the train to South Croydon and exploring southwards and eastwards. We had no single definite object now that no eggs were to be found. Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark. Students we were not: nothing was pursued to the uttermost. We merely became accustomed to the general life of the common birds and animals, and to the appearances of trees and clouds and everything upon the surface that showed itself to the naked eye. Some rare thrush or robin we might stop to listen to; or we might watch a wren threading a bush or a tit on a
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birch-spray, or look at a mossy greenfinch’s nest or climb up with some sort of unfounded hope to a big nest which had escaped us in spring; but for the most part we were moving and usually fast.
When it froze we were content with what we saw as we stalked up and down the round ice of Beverley Brook. Only at night did we join the throng of skaters pure and simple. If the weather was bad and we were not together and no school work had to be done, I read books of travel, sport and natural history. I remember those of Waterton, Thomas Edward, Buckland, Wallace, Charles Kingsley, but above all Richard Jefferies.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jefferies]
If I say little of Jefferies it is because not a year passed thereafter without many copious draughts of him and I cannot pretend to distinguish amongst them. But very soon afterwards I was writing out in each one of his books and elsewhere — as in a cousin’s album — when I had the opportunity, those last words of The Amateur Poacher: "Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still." They were a gospel, an incantation. What I liked in the books was the free open-air life, the spice of illegality and daring, roguish characters — the opportunities so far exceeding my own, the gun, the great pond, the country home, the apparently endless leisure — the glorious moments that one could always recapture
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by opening the Poacher — and the tinge of sadness here and there as in the picture of the old moucher perishing in his sleep by the lime kiln, and the heron flying over in the morning indifferent. Obviously Jefferies had lived a very different boyhood from ours, yet one which we longed for and supposed ourselves fit for. He had never had to wear his best clothes for twelve or fourteen hours on Sunday. Enforced attendances at church and Sunday school could not have been known to him. The crowd parading in their Sunday-best clothes along the walks of the Commons was impossible in that southern county.
I had begun to write accounts of my walks in an approach as near as possible to the style of Jefferies. They had grown out of the school essay on holidays which I was able to take some pains over, as, for example, in arrangement and in making a dignified conclusion, with a Latin quotation. After the last summer holiday I won a botany book as a prize at the Sunday school with one essay of this kind. The minister encouraged me in my outdoor tastes with much kindness and the best of his ability. He even persuaded the editor of a children’s paper to print my descriptions of country walks. But like all other grown-up people he inspired me with discomfort, strangeness, a desire to escape. I could never answer him naturally. I unconsciously affected a suitable solemnity and what I imagined to be an adult way of looking at things. My face was very
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easily robbed of all expression by fear of any kind, and this expressionless expression bore a resemblance to pathetic gravity, though out of fear and a dislike of inflicting visible pain I always seemed to agree and obey: then ran out into the dark street and round a corner to laugh with John or Jimmy. However, I think the minister had something to do with the essays I wrote and the natural history notes I kept day by day besides the almost daily entries in a general diary.
No book read at school was to me ever anything like as delightful as
The Amateur Poacher. Of schoolwork I did only what, in order to avoid much trouble with masters and parents, I had to do. I did not like not being able to answer a question, particularly if another boy could. Therefore I learnt nothing thoroughly. I merely kept a place at the top of the form in the matter of geography, history, and English, and not far from the top altogether. Therefore, also, I did not lose my scholarship or get more than a few stern five minutes from my father and my form-master. I was praised, too, as I remember clearly, for to listen to praise gave me an aching pain between the legs. But if I made an effort, it was with half my mind, without ambition. My father wanted me to go on to a Public School and I received special lessons in Latin verse and in Greek. But Greek grammar, Herodotus and Ovid were nuisances: I attended to them only because to ignore them altogether would have brought worse nuisances. I was
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thinking all the time about John and Jefferies and Merton and fishing and bird-nesting. Yet I believed that I could do better at lessons if I wished, and it was one of my proud moments when I saw my name at the top of a list in Latin, with an adverse comment by the master alongside it. Excelling the rest, I had done badly.
My father made efforts to stimulate interests. He set me learning botany from books and lectures: I learnt nothing but a few names which I could not forget. He used to talk to me of books and take me ito lectures. At Kelmscott House I heard Grant Allen recommending State endowment of literary genius: I saw William Morris and I was pleased and awed. But nothing I ever heard at home attracted me to literature or the arts. I saw my father reading Wilhelm Meister in German: it seemed to be wonderful, tedious, the sort of thing a grown-up person would do. Nor did I meet boys who cared for books that were not stories or natural history.
There were, however, several hundred books at home, and among them volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning. From the Tennyson, which was a gilt-edged selection belonging to my mother, I had had to learn in parts of "In Memoriam" for recitation, as my next brother had done "The Captain: A Legend of the Navy". Exactly when and why I began to read some of the other poems with pleasure, I cannot say, but it was
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when I was about fifteen. I know that I read the May Queen over and over again. I enjoyed the beauty of spring mixed with the sadness of early death. I liked the soft sadness as I had liked the severer sadness of
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I liked saying the saddest lines aloud with appropriate solemnity. I liked the name Effie. So on Sunday when Jimmy and I walked out in our best clothes I took Tennyson with me. The fact that there might be a girl there whom I wanted to know did not enable me to stand much of the Sunday crowd, and very soon I turned aside and began to read Tennyson, sometimes aloud. Jimmy scoffed impatiently. Neither the verses nor my indulgence in them pleased or interested him at all. It was long before I learnt to escape from Sunday by going into the country. Chapel and Sunday school broke the heart of the day. At most I got away sometimes to Wimbledon, or, starting very early, walked to Kingston and back in time for morning service. As John was equally enslaved, I still sometimes strolled out with Jimmy, fortified by Tennyson.
I am almost certain that the reading of poetry was connected with my liking for a girl named Blanche. At any rate I was delighted to find in King John the lines
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty, Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche?
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She was a tall thin freckled girl of about my own age with good rather large features, dark hair and grey eyes, and an austere expression. Always in her company for the Sunday parade, or ordinary walk, were two fair-haired sisters, her cousins, one distinctly younger, one older than she was. John and I admired them. We sought every opportunity of meeting them and taking off our hats to them and getting smiles from them. Though they usually approached us with suppressed smiles and were certainly not exceptionally inaccessible we were slow to get on speaking terms with them. When we did we had no idea what to say; not had they. If one of us said something about the weather and got an answer it was enough. If silence lasted long they were certain to giggle.
Dread of being met by their parents or friends of our own added still more to the awkwardness of these short meetings, though when we did all run into Blanche’s mother she had nothing but smiles for us. She was a red-faced woman whom we regarded as in every way inferior to our own mothers: in fact the girls themselves were a shade below what we desired, though we never confessed it or that any greater bliss was possible than in being accepted by them as sweethearts. I hardly imagined that I should ever kiss Blanche: to hear her deep voice, to receive her grave smiles, often would have been enough. And so concentrated was I upon her that I treated contemptuously a pretty lusty full-lipped red-cheeked girl who
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sometimes waylaid me and sometimes sent messages by a young sister. I was more tempted by the prostitutes, coarse, middle-aged, ill-dressed, who addressed me as "darling" and used to walk up and down out of darkness to the light of a lamp and back again, in the less frequented Common pathways. But I was too timid and too ignorant.
[prostitutes!]
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X. PUBLIC SCHOOL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
With Blanche I never got beyond buying her roses and lilies of the valley, and once an expensive prayer-book. That was when I had already gone on to a Public School.
I had failed to win a scholarship; only in English did I make any show at all: and I entered a form consisting of a few boys who had won or were going to compete for history scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge. All were older by two or three years than myself. I had never before met boys like them. They not only read many books and saw many plays, and held strong opinions about them, but they argued about persons and events and movements in English and foreign literature. When Maupassant died they discussed his merits as a story-writer. When one of them, in answer to a question, got out of me the statement — which was not true — that we had Meredith’s books at home, he smiled with delight and said something to the effect that a house containing Meredith’s work was blessed.
I continued to read chiefly Jefferies
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and the naturalists, whom these boys knew nothing of. "What are you reading, Thomas?" asked one of the boys who already wore a scholar’s gown. "The Gamekeeper at Home," said I. "The gamekeeper’s place is the woods," said he. And I kept silence, not venturing to remark that the woods were his home.
The whole school impressed and alarmed me. The head master, a thick old grey-bearded heavy-lidded gruff-voiced man with creased florid face and creased black clothes, impressed and alarmed me. I should have done anything he told me, but he never told me to do anything except, "Speak up. I’m an old man." Once or twice he glanced at my Greek as I sat with a very few other boys in the great hall. I knew nothing; I was humbled but hardly stirred to effort. The hundreds of boys also humbled me. Many of them wore men’s clothes, carried their books in bags like clerks’, and seemed to me grimly earnest and thinking only of work and success. Many others looked well off, spoke in more refined voices than I was used to.
I came alone in the morning, and in the afternoon I went home alone, often in a railway carriage containing three or four schoolfellows, but alone, in a state of discomfort which would I imagined have been multiplied if they had taken any notice of me, which they never once did, in spite of my morbid looking out for signs that they noticed my discomfort. During the middle of the day I was alone: I stood alone watching Rugby football or
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practice for the sports. For most of the boys in my form went home to lunch; the rest also disappeared. If I had lunch at school I sat alone and was spoken to only once. Opposite me sat several much older boys whose serious faces and eager voices in argument fascinated me, so that I could not but stare, until one day one of them, a pale black- haired youth with strong lean scowling features, asked me why the devil I couldn’t mind my own business.
Perhaps it was to avoid this school meal that I took to having lunch out, or, rather, buying a few buns to eat in the class room while I read Jefferies. The reasons why I did not play games are that I was never asked to and was shy, and that I was unaccustomed to Rugby football.
When I was not reading or watching games I walked along the far side of the river watching the gulls and swans, sometimes in such wretchedness that I wanted to drown myself. My form-master, seeing me reading when he came in long before the afternoon school was to begin, asked me what I did with myself, did I ever skate or take any decent exercise. He was abrupt and looked contemptuous. I muttered something about skating and country walks. My wrists and hands and arms were always decorated with scratches during the bird-nesting season, but of course he knew nothing of that. Nor had he seen the words which I had written, perhaps not quite without ostentation, in the worst possible Latin on the flyleaf of my algebra book: "I love birds more than books." Seen
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by a clever boy who sat next to me in the mathematical class, these words caused a contemptuous smile in him and in me one of sickly shame for the badness of the Latin. I felt unimportant, isolated, out of place, and only not despised because I was utterly unnoticed; but afterwards I developed some sort of pride in the great names connected with the school in past centuries, and also in its present successes at the universities, on the football field and elsewhere. Naturally then I felt extraordinarily unimportant.
I had now a faint ambition, both definite and indefinite, to do something in connection with learning or literature. My father wished me to try for a history scholarship and I occasionally read as hard as it was possible to do without any interest in history beyond the attempt to memorize facts. I suppose there never were duller books than Bright’s England, Kitchin’s France, Lodge’s Europe, anybody’s Political Economy (Marshall), and I had no idea of history beyond assimilating these.
When I was persuaded to propose something at the debating society which included my class and a few of our friends, my opponent began by congratulating me on my "admirable summary of Bright’. It had simply not occurred to me that there was anything to do but summarize Bright. I had never had any grounds for differing from the historian I had last read. The other boys either had enormous appetites for books of many kinds, or they had native wit. I seemed to have nothing.
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The one thing I may have had a native taste for was composition. I had feelings which I could not have explained as to forms of expression; I had at the back of my mind sometimes what seemed to me a right phrase and I groped for it. Writing was not a mere nuisance. Whether I had any ability I have no ground for saying. I must usually have been aping forms I had observed in books and newspapers. That I had begun to euphemize I know, because I said in an essay on holidays that some people waited for the twelfth of August, instead of saying that they went grouse-shooting. Running his pencil through this decidedly, my form-master substituted the natural and direct phrase. I saw the fault and blushed for it. With or without the help of English I began to be near the top of the form as soon as the two scholars had gone up to Oxford.
Apart, however, from the personal influence in the direction of scrupulousness on the part of a master who dropped a beautiful bryony in the middle of discussing the Bacchae with disgust because a boy said the plant was an American, I was hardly doing more than acquiring unrelated information, and forming the habit of reading what did not interest me. I read the Greek Testament slowly and the Bacchae more slowly, and large quantities of history and historical geography rapidly. Some books were less dull than others, but still everything at school was an aimless task performed to the letter only. It cost me many night hours, all the
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more because I was reading of one thing and thinking of another, and had therefore again and again to go back to a point where I had begun, merely to see the print without understanding.
I made no close friends at the new school. The elder boys either took no notice of me or soon got tired of trying to get something out of me. They alarmed me, and since I did not want to give myself away, and words came darkly and with difficulty when I was disturbed, I said almost nothing: what I did say I often felt to be obscure or false, but for fear of worse I did not correct it. I admired them for their free abundant conversation, their easy manners, their scrupulous nail-cutting during conversation, the material of their clothes, which were so different from my black or blue or grey ready-made clothes.
When we were left to ourselves for a time, two of them would begin saying their parts for amateur theatricals; three or four would chat; the one bookworm looked up something in a lexicon wherewith to convict the master; and I would look out of the window at the white clouds, the dark trees, the green grass and the black rooks canting on it, and the pigeons flying up with sticks for their nests, and perhaps made a note of the alternation or mingling of snow, hail, rain and sunshine in late February.
Only one boy in the class did I ever visit, though with one or two I had a shy friendly feeling. This one was a boy who lived in a big house with a billiard room. His father
[ET calls him "Johnson", p.148.]
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had his boots pulled off and his slippers put on by a beautiful youth. I sat at dinner there between a pretty sister and an old aunt who tried hard to get me to talk about my walks and about my printed descriptions of them. For these I had mentioned to several boys, concealing the name of the paper where they appeared, because I was ashamed of it, and at least once when one was making guesses, admitted that I had contributed to a well-known Liberal evening paper — which I had not done. This evening visit was an agony to me. Shyness made me terribly severe and reticent and gave me an appearance of great calm which was perhaps useful to me and was certainly annoying to others. I never went again.
The boy made an effort to meet me more than half-way by joining me in Richmond Park to fish, though he was no fisherman. When he arrived I had had a very glorious quarter of an hour. I was the only person fishing there and was trying to land a jack of some size without a landing net, when a girl’s school came by. In my excitement I very brusquely asked one of the girls to bring me my net, which had been out of my reach, which she without consulting the mistress rapidly and very sweetly did, thereby doubling the pleasure and glory of my catch. The fish was over four pounds in weight. The girl — whom I scarcely looked at — was beautiful. It was still early morning. After that I remember the boy coming and being very helpful and obedient in what he did not understand. Above all I
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remember coming home with my bag on my shoulder and some inches of the fish’s excess sticking out of one corner. My strides were huge. Before opening the gate I smiled proudly in at our windows as I passed. The fish was stuffed, not with sawdust, but with good chicken stuffing, for Sunday’s dinner. As for Johnson, I remember that in the summer after I had left he sent me a letter with a ticket for the school sports, and that I did not go, nor thanked him until some months later, when I pretended that the letter had been mislaid and unopened until that very day. I never saw Johnson again.
On going to the Public School I had without thinking of it dropped all connection with my old school. I never went once again inside its gates. For I was shy and the boys I knew there had been accidental acquaintances with the exception of John. George, though he continued to live close by us, became a mere nodder. At most we stopped and exchanged a few casual questions and answers about our schools, the masters, and so on. The other boys I practically never again set eyes on: if I did I very carefully avoided meeting them, for fear of the discomfort of uselessly disturbing for a moment the sleeping past. I feared also the mere coming face to face with anyone who was not an intimate. People in shops, distant relatives, all older and assured men and women, alarmed me. If I had to speak to them I unconsciously assumed a slow stiff manner
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and speech that probably did sometimes conceal my intense uneasiness. For those I liked I would have done anything, though what I did was little beyond waiting up and down for John or Henry, outside their houses, or outside some house where they had to call, often for hours and hours, dully but uncomplainingly destroying time, half stupefying myself with recurring thoughts and repeated efforts to stifle them. I was not on friendly terms with more than a very few.
Occasionally I saw Jimmy, who had been with me at my last school but one, and lived only a few doors away. For a time he was eager to possess many eggs. Also he was willing to join me now and then on a long walk. It was with him that I set out at daybreak for Ashtead on the first Good Friday after I went to the Public School and soon after my sixteenth birthday. Easter was early, yet pushing through thorny copses we found thrushes' eggs in hedges and shrubberies not many miles along our road, and climbed amid clouds of wood powder to an empty pigeon’s nest. Not for anything else did we stop, three times perhaps in the fourteen or fifteen miles before dinner. Ewell and Epsom could not stay us. The day was clear, bright, mild — not too mild. I think we spent the afternoon in the woods and returned by train.
Jimmy soon gave up such things. He had begun to smoke and to work at a bank. The last time he came with me to Merton was a November afternoon. We started too late. As we looked over the flat fields and
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line of poplars beyond Morden station the light was already going. Jimmy lit a pipe: our spirits flagged. Suddenly the idea came to Jimmy of the coffee tavern a mile back. He proposed to return. I leapt at the idea so eagerly that he sniggered his snigger as violently as possible. So we returned, running, to eat pastry and drink hot coffee.
At long intervals I had Henry or one of the Joneses for company. Of these walks I only know that I crossed new commons and went down new deep chalk lanes in Kent and Surrey, and that once during the greater part of a walk to Curlsdon and back, which was well over twenty miles, my boot was chafing my heel. Periodically for ten years the heel reminded me of that walk by being unable to endure a shoe on it.
My whole holiday on Saturday I spent usually with John, and sometimes Sundays, for it was now increasingly painful to me to sit in chapel, on account of my shyness and the waste of time. Out of doors we fished or walked. Indoors we looked at our collections or skinned a squirrel a gamekeeper in Kent had sent to John — once we had a woodcock — more often it was a rat or a starling. As there was no obvious opportunity for playing games, I never seriously played football or cricket again. At most John and I would join his younger brother in kicking a ball about at nightfall. But some evenings, and for several series of early mornings, we used to put on vests and shirts and run a mile or two. Though we desired to be strong and fit
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this is all we ever did deliberately with that end in view.
The result was no more than that we could always trot two or three miles or run a mile at a fair pace without discomfort. I at least often went jaded to school from overdoing it before breakfast. John was beautifully made all over, with clear ruddy skin, and could run, jump, climb, swim, and feared neither men nor tree-tops. My body was nothing to be proud or careful of. I was tall for my age, large-footed, skinny everywhere, and as John had pointed out, pigeon chested. I could not jump high or far, or run better than the average boy. I was no climber. On tall trees even where there was plenty of foothold I was very nervous, though not in the least dizzy; and I could not swarm at all. Anything troublesome to climb had to be tackled by John. When we got climbing irons I paid my share but never ventured a yard upon them. That I had quick sight and hearing, and could walk fast and far, was nothing to boast of. How I should have liked physical prowess! How ashamed I was of my chest! What efforts I made to clear away any risk of being called knock-kneed. On the other hand my health was good, except that I sometimes had headaches and in the summer bleeding of the nose.
I hardly remember lying in bed during the day since I was ten. I had few coughs, colds or fevers and never anything worth calling influenza. So that one feverish home-coming when I was thirteen was memorable, for as I lay on my bed in
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the broad daylight I had a not unpleasant half-dream, seeing myself going far up an infinitely long pillared corridor.
It may have been soon after this that I began to have a trivial but strange experience which has been repeated once or twice a year ever since. It happens mostly when I am lying down in bed waiting for sleep, and only on nights when I sleep well. I close my eyes and I find myself very dimly seeing expand before me a vague immense space enclosed with invisible boundaries. Yet it can hardly be called seeing. All is grey, dull, formless, and I am aware chiefly by some other means than sight of vast unshapely towering masses of a colourless subject which I feel to be soft. Through these things and the space I grope slowly. They tend to fade away, but I can recover them by an effort perhaps half a dozen times, and do so because it is somehow pleasant or alluring. Then I usually sleep. During the experience I am well awake and am remembering that it is a repetition, wondering what it means and if anything new will occur, and taking care not to disturb the process.
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