You could go
wherever
you liked in the woods in those days.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
Sitting in
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did. Neither us went
there till we were nine. It meant a four-mile bike ride morning and evening, and Mother
was scared of allowing us among the traffic, which by that time included a very few
motor- cars.
For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs Howlett. Most of the
shopkeepers’ children went there, to save them from the shame and come-down of going
to the board school, though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old imposter and
worse than useless as a teacher. She was over seventy, she was very deaf, she could
hardly see through her spectacles, and all she owned in the way of equipment was a cane,
a blackboard, a few dog- eared grammar books, and a couple of dozen smelly slates. She
could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and played truant as often
as they felt like it. Once there was a frightful scandal cause a boy put his hand up a girl’s
dress, a thing I didn’t understand at the time. Mother Howlett succeeded in hushing it up.
When you did something particularly bad her formula was ‘I’ll tell your father’, and on
very rare occasions she did so. But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren’t do
it too often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so old and clumsy
that it was easy to dodge.
Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who called themselves the
Black Hand. The leader was Sid Lovegrove, the saddler’s younger son, who was about
thirteen, and there were two other shopkeepers’ sons, an errand boy from the brewery,
and two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with the gang for a
couple of hours. The fann lads were great lumps bursting out of corduroy breeches, with
very broad accents and rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were
tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of the others. One of
them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a rabbit in his hands occasionally. If he saw
one lying in the grass he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle. There was a big
social distinction between the shopkeepers’ sons and the sons of labourers and farm-
hands, but the local boys didn’t usually pay much attention to it till they were about
sixteen. The gang had a secret password and an ‘ordeal’ which included cutting your
finger and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be frightful
desperadoes. Certainly they managed to make a nuisance of themselves, broke windows
chased cows, tore the knockers off doors, and stole fruit by the hundredweight.
Sometimes in winter they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the
farmers would let them. They all had catapults and squailers, and they were always
saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those days cost five shillings, but the savings
never amounted to more than about threepence. In summer they used to go fishing and
bird- nesting. When Joe was at Mrs Howlett’s he used to cut school at least once a week,
and even at the Grammar School he managed it about once a fortnight. There was a boy
at the Grammar School, an auctioneer’s son, who could copy any handwriting and for a
penny he’d forge a letter from your mother saying you’d been ill yesterday. Of course I
was wild to join the Black Hand, but Joe always choked me off and said they didn’t want
any blasted kids hanging round.
It was the thought of going fishing that really appealed to me. At eight years old I hadn’t
yet been fishing, except with a penny net, with which you can sometimes catch a
stickleback. Mother was always terrified of letting us go anywhere near water. She
‘forbade’ fishing, in the way in which parents in those days ‘forbade’ almost everything,
and I hadn’t yet grasped that grownups can’t see round corners. But the thought of fishing
sent me wild with excitement. Many a time I’d been past the pool at the Mill Farm and
watched the small carp basking on the surface, and sometimes under the willow tree at
the corner a great diamond- shaped carp that to my eyes looked enormous — six inches
long, I suppose — would suddenly rise to the surface, gulp down a grub, and sink again.
I’d spent hours gluing my nose against the window of Wallace’s in the High Street,
where fishing tackle and guns and bicycles were sold. I used to he awake on summer
mornings thinking of the tales Joe had told me about fishing, how you mixed bread paste,
how your float gives a bob and plunges under and you feel the rod bending and the fish
tugging at the line. Is it any use talking about it, I wonder — the sort of fairy light that fish
and fishing tackle have in a kid’s eyes? Some kids feel the same about guns and shooting,
some feel it about motor-bikes or aeroplanes or horses. It’s not a thing that you can
explain or rationalize, it’s merely magic. One morning — it was in June and I must have
been eight — I knew that Joe was going to cut school and go out fishing, and I made up
my mind to follow. In some way Joe guessed what I was thinking about, and he started
on me while we were dressing.
‘Now then, young George! Don’t you get thinking you’re coming with the gang today.
You stay back home. ’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t think nothing about it. ’
‘Yes, you did! You thought you were coming with the gang. ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! You stay back home. We don’t want any bloody kids along. ’
Joe had just learned the word ‘bloody’ and was always using it. Father overheard him
once and swore that he’d thrash the life out of Joe, but as usual he didn’t do so. After
breakfast Joe started off on his bike, with his satchel and his Grammar School cap, five
minutes early as he always did when he meant to cut school, and when it was time for me
to leave for Mother Howlett’s I sneaked off and hid in the lane behind the allotments. I
knew the gang were going to the pond at the Mill Farm, and I was going to follow them if
they murdered me for it. Probably they’d give me a hiding, and probably I wouldn’t get
home to dinner, and then Mother would know that I’d cut school and I’d get another
hiding, but I didn’t care. I was just desperate to go fishing with the gang. I was cunning,
too. I allowed Joe plenty of time to make a circuit round and get to the Mill Farm by
road, and then I followed down the lane and skirted round the meadows on the far side of
the hedge, so as to get almost to the pond before the gang saw me. It was a wonderful
June morning. The buttercups were up to my knees. There was a breath of wind just
stirring the tops of the elms, and the great green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and
rich like silk. And it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round me
it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild roses were still in bloom,
and bits of soft white cloud drifting overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the
dim blue masses of the woods round Upper Binfield. And I didn’t give a damn for any of
it. All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp and the gang with their hooks
and lines and bread paste. It was as though they were in paradise and I’d got to join them.
Presently I managed to sneak up on them — four of them, Joe and Sid Lovegrove and the
errand boy and another shopkeeper’s son, Harry Bames I think his name was.
Joe turned and saw me. ‘Christ! ’ he said. ‘It’s the kid. ’ He walked up to me like a tom-cat
that’s going to start a fight. ‘Now then, you! What’d I tell you? You get back ‘ome
double quick. ’
Both Joe and I were inclined to drop our aitches if we were at all excited. I backed away
from him.
‘I’m not going back ‘ome. ’
‘Yes you are. ’
‘Clip his ear, Joe,’ said Sid. ‘We don’t want no kids along. ’
‘ARE you going back ‘ome? ’ said Joe.
‘No. ’
‘Righto, my boy! Right-HO! ’
Then he started on me. The next minute he was chasing me round, catching me one clip
after another. But I didn’t run away from the pool, I ran in circles. Presently he’d caught
me and got me down, and then he knelt on my upper anns and began screwing my ears,
which was his favourite torture and one I couldn’t stand. I was blubbing by this time, but
still I wouldn’t give in and promise to go home. I wanted to stay and go fishing with the
gang. And suddenly the others swung round in my favour and told Joe to get up off my
chest and let me stay if I wanted to. So I stayed after all.
The others had some hooks and lines and floats and a lump of bread paste in a rag, and
we all cut ourselves willow switches from the tree at the comer of the pool. The
farmhouse was only about two hundred yards away, and you had to keep out of sight
because old Brewer was very down on fishing. Not that it made any difference to him, he
only used the pool for watering his cattle, but he hated boys. The others were still jealous
of me and kept telling me to get out of the light and reminding me that I was only a kid
and knew nothing about fishing. They said that I was making such a noise I’d scare all
the fish away, though actually I was making about half as much noise as anyone else
there. Finally they wouldn’t let me sit beside them and sent me to another part of the pool
where the water was shallower and there wasn’t so much shade. They said a kid like me
was sure to keep splashing the water and frighten the fish away. It was a rotten part of the
pool, a part where no fish would ordinarily come. I knew that. I seemed to know by a
kind of instinct the places where a fish would lie. Still, I was fishing at last. I was sitting
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots.
You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters. Then we went round
by the lodge of Binfield House. There was a rumour that somewhere in the grounds there
was a pond with enonnous fish in it, but no one ever dared go inside because old Hodges,
the lodge-keeper who acted as a kind of caretaker, was ‘down’ on boys. He was digging
in his vegetable garden by the lodge when we passed. We cheeked him over the fence
until he chased us off, and then we went down to the Walton Road and cheeked the
carters, keeping on the other side of the hedge so that they couldn’t reach us with their
whips. Beside the Walton Road there was a place that had been a quarry and then a
rubbish dump, and finally had got overgrown with blackberry bushes. There were great
mounds of rusty old tin cans and bicycle frames and saucepans with holes in them and
broken bottles with weeds growing all over them, and we spent nearly an hour and got
ourselves filthy from head to foot routing out iron fence posts, because Harry Bames
swore that the blacksmith in Lower Binfield would pay sixpence a hundredweight for old
iron. Then Joe found a late thrush’s nest with half-fledged chicks in it in a blackberry
bush. After a lot of argument about what to do with them we took the chicks out, had
shots at them with stones, and finally stamped on them. There were four of them, and we
each had one to stamp on. It was getting on towards tea-time now. We knew that old
Brewer would be as good as his word and there was a hiding ahead of us, but we were
getting too hungry to stay out much longer. Finally we trailed home, with one more row
on the way, because when we were passing the allotments we saw a rat and chased it with
sticks, and old Bennet the station-master, who worked at his allotment every night and
was very proud of it, came after us in a tearing rage because we’d trampled on his onion-
bed.
I’d walked ten miles and I wasn’t tired. All day I’d trailed after the gang and tried to do
everything they did, and they’d called me ‘the kid’ and snubbed me as much as they
could, but I’d more or less kept my end up. I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling
you can’t know about unless you’ve had it — but if you’re a man you’ll have had it some
time. I knew that I wasn’t a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it’s a wonderful thing
to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill
birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of strong, rank
feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with
breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, the hot sweaty feeling of one’s
clothes, the smell of fennel and wild peppennint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the
rubbish dump, the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the stamping
on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line — it was all part of it. Thank
God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.
Sure enough, old Brewer had sent round and told everybody. Father looked very glum,
fetched a strap out of the shop, and said he was going to ‘thrash the life out of Joe. But
Joe struggled and yelled and kicked, and in the end Father didn’t get in more than a
couple of whacks at him. However, he got a caning from the headmaster of the Grammar
School next day. I tried to struggle too, but I was small enough for Mother to get me
across her knee, and she gave me what-for with the strap. So I’d had three hidings that
day, one from Joe, one from old Brewer, and one from Mother. Next day the gang
decided that I wasn’t really a member yet and that I’d got to go through the ‘ordeal’ (a
word they’d got out of the Red Indian stories) after all. They were very strict in insisting
that you had to bite the wonn before you swallowed it. Moreover, because I was the
youngest and they were jealous of me for being the only one to catch anything, they all
made out afterwards that the fish I’d caught wasn’t really a big one. In a general way the
tendency of fish, when people talk about them, is to get bigger and bigger, but this one
got smaller and smaller, until to hear the others talk you’d have thought it was no bigger
than a minnow.
But it didn’t matter. I’d been fishing. I’d seen the float dive under the water and felt the
fish tugging at the line, and however many lies they told they couldn’t take that away
from me.
4
For the next seven years, from when I was eight to when I was fifteen, what I chiefly
remember is fishing.
Don’t think that I did nothing else. It’s only that when you look back over a long period
of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else. I left
Mother Howlett’s and went to the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black
cap with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time afterwards my first long
trousers. My first bike was a fixed- wheel — free-wheel bikes were very expensive then.
When you went downhill you put your feet up on the front rests and let the pedals go
whizzing round. That was one of the characteristic sights of the early nineteen-
hundreds — a boy sailing downhill with his head back and his feet up in the air. I went to
the Grammar School in fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me
about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was certainly a
dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a wolf, and at the end of the big
schoolroom he had a glass case with canes in it, which he’d sometimes take out and
swish through the air in a terrifying manner. But to my surprise I did rather well at
school. It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer than Joe, who was two years
older than me and had bullied me ever since he could walk. Actually Joe was an utter
dunce, got the cane about once a week, and stayed somewhere near the bottom of the
school till he was sixteen. My second term I took a prize in arithmetic and another in
some queer stuff that was mostly concerned with pressed flowers and went by the name
of Science, and by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships and
Reading University. Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me in those days, was very
anxious that I should go to ‘college’. There was an idea floating round that I was to be a
schoolteacher and Joe was to be an auctioneer.
But I haven’t many memories connected with school. When I’ve mixed with chaps from
the upper classes, as I did during the war, I’ve been struck by the fact that they never
really get over that frightful drilling they go through at public schools. Either it flattens
them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their lives kicking against it. It wasn’t so
with boys of our class, the sons of shopkeepers and farmers. You went to the Grammar
School and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you weren’t a prole,
but school was chiefly a place that you wanted to get away from. You’d no sentiment of
loyalty, no goofy feeling about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough,
the school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old Boy’s tie and
not even a school song. You had your half-holidays to yourself, because games weren’t
compulsory and as often as not you cut them. We played football in braces, and though it
was considered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary shirt and trousers.
The only game I really cared about was the stump cricket we used to play in the gravel
yard during the break, with a bat made out of a bit of packing case and a compo ball.
But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and dust and boots, and
the stone in the yard that had been a mounting block and was used for sharpening knives
on, and the little baker’s shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the
size of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy Busters and cost a
halfpenny. I did all the things you do at school. I carved my name on a desk and got the
cane for it — you were always caned for it if you were caught, but it was the etiquette that
you had to carve your name. And I got inky lingers and bit my nails and made darts out
of penholders and played conkers and passed round dirty stories and learned to
masturbate and cheeked old Blowers, the English master, and bullied the life out of little
Willy Simeon, the undertaker’s son, who was half- witted and believed everything you
told him. Our favourite trick was to send him to shops to buy things that didn’t exist. All
the old gags — the ha’porth of penny stamps, the rubber hammer, the left-handed
screwdriver, the pot of striped paint — poor Willy fell for all of them. We had grand sport
one afternoon, putting him in a tub and telling him to lift himself up by the handles. He
ended up in an asylum, poor Willy. But it was in the holidays that one really lived.
There were good things to do in those days. In winter we used to borrow a couple of
ferrets — Mother would never let Joe and me keep them at home, ‘nasty smelly things’
she called them — and go round the farms and ask leave to do a bit of ratting. Sometimes
they let us, sometimes they told us to hook it and said we were more trouble than the rats.
Later in winter we’d follow the threshing machine and help kill the rats when they
threshed the stacks. One winter, 1908 it must have been, the Thames flooded and then
froze and there was skating for weeks on end, and Harry Bames broke his collar- bone on
the ice. In early spring we went after squirrels with squailers, and later on we went
birdnesting. We had a theory that birds can’t count and it’s all right if you leave one egg,
but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample
on the eggs or chicks. There was another game we had when the toads were spawning.
We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow
them up till they burst. That’s what boys are like, I don’t know why. In summer we used
to bike over the Burford Weir and bathe. Wally Lovegrove, Sid’s young cousin, was
drowned in 1906. He got tangled in the weeds at the bottom, and when the drag-hooks
brought his body to the surface his face was jet black.
But fishing was the real thing. We went many a time to old Brewer’s pool, and took tiny
carp and tench out of it, and once a whopping eel, and there were other cow-ponds that
had fish in them and were within walking distance on Saturday afternoons. But after we
got bicycles we started fishing in the Thames below Burford Weir. It seemed more
grown-up than fishing in cow-ponds. There were no farmers chasing you away, and there
are thumping fish in the Thames — though, so far as I know, nobody’s ever been known to
catch one.
It’s queer, the feeling I had for fishing — and still have, really. I can’t call myself a
fisherman. I’ve never in my life caught a fish two feet long, and it’s thirty years now
since I’ve had a rod in my hands. And yet when I look back the whole of my boyhood
from eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went fishing. Every
detail has stuck clear in my memory. I can remember individual days and individual fish,
there isn’t a cow- pond or a backwater that I can’t see a picture of if I shut my eyes and
think. I could write a book on the technique of fishing. When we were kids we didn’t
have much in the way of tackle, it cost too much and most of our threepence a week
(which was the usual pocket- money in those days) went on sweets and Lardy Busters.
Very small kids generally fish with a bent pin, which is too blunt to be much use, but you
can make a pretty good hook (though of course it’s got no barb) by bending a needle in a
candle flame with a pair of pliers. The farm lads knew how to plait horsehair so that it
was almost as good as gut, and you can take a small fish on a single horsehair. Later we
got to having two-shilling fishing-rods and even reels of sorts. God, what hours I’ve spent
gazing into Wallace’s window! Even the . 410 guns and saloon pistols didn’t thrill me so
much as the fishing tackle. And the copy of Gamage’s catalogue that I picked up
somewhere, on a rubbish dump I think, and studied as though it had been the Bible! Even
now I could give you all the details about gut-substitute and gimp and Limerick hooks
and priests and disgorgers and Nottingham reels and God knows how many other
technicalities.
Then there were the kinds of bait we used to use. In our shop there were always plenty of
mealworms, which were good but not very good. Gentles were better. You had to beg
them off old Gravitt, the butcher, and the gang used to draw lots or do enamena-mina-mo
to decide who should go and ask, because Gravitt wasn’t usually too pleasant about it. He
was a big, rough-faced old devil with a voice like a mastiff, and when he barked, as he
generally did when speaking to boys, all the knives and steels on his blue apron would
give a jingle. You’d go in with an empty treacle-tin in your hand, hang round till any
customers had disappeared and then say very humbly:
‘Please, Mr Gravitt, y’got any gentles today? ’
Generally he’d roar out: ‘What! Gentles! Gentles in my shop! Ain’t seen such a thing in
years. Think I got blow-flies in my shop? ’
He had, of course. They were everywhere. He used to deal with them with a strip of
leather on the end of a stick, with which he could reach out to enonnous distances and
smack a fly into paste. Sometimes you had to go away without any gentles, but as a rule
he’d shout after you just as you were going:
“Ere! Go round the backyard an’ ‘ave a look. P’raps you might find one or two if you
looked careful. ’
You used to find them in little clusters everywhere. Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a
battlefield. Butchers didn’t have refrigerators in those days. Gentles live longer if you
keep them in sawdust.
Wasp grubs are good, though it’s hard to make them stick on the hook, unless you bake
them first. When someone found a wasps’ nest we’d go out at night and pour turpentine
down it and plug up the hole with mud. Next day the wasps would all be dead and you
could dig out the nest and take the grubs. Once something went wrong, the turps missed
the hole or something, and when we took the plug out the wasps, which had been shut up
all night, came out all together with a zoom. We weren’t very badly stung, but it was a
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch. Grasshoppers are about the best bait
there is, especially for chub. You stick them on the hook without any shot and just flick
them to and fro on the surface — ‘dapping’, they call it. But you can never get more than
two or three grasshoppers at a time. Greenbottle flies, which are also damned difficult to
catch, are the best bait for dace, especially on clear days. You want to put them on the
hook alive, so that they wriggle. A chub will even take a wasp, but it’s a ticklish job to
put a live wasp on the hook.
God knows how many other baits there were. Bread paste you make by squeezing water
through white bread in a rag. Then there are cheese paste and honey paste and paste with
aniseed in it. Boiled wheat isn’t bad for roach. Redworms are good for gudgeon. You find
them in very old manure heaps. And you also find another kind of worm called a
brandling, which is striped and smells like an earwig, and which is very good bait for
perch. Ordinary earthworms are good for perch. You have to put them in moss to keep
them fresh and lively. If you try to keep them in earth they die. Those brown flies you
find on cowdung are pretty good for roach. You can take a chub on a cherry, so they say,
and I’ve seen a roach taken with a currant out of a bun.
In those days, from the sixteenth of June (when the coarse-fishing season starts) till
midwinter I wasn’t often without a tin of worms or gentles in my pocket. I had some
fights with Mother about it, but in the end she gave in, fishing came off the list of
forbidden things and Father even gave me a two-shilling fishing-rod for Christmas in
1903. Joe was barely fifteen when he started going after girls, and from then on he
seldom came out fishing, which he said was a kid’s game. But there were about half a
dozen others who were as mad on fishing as I was. Christ, those fishing days! The hot
sticky afternoons in the schoolroom when I’ve sprawled across my desk, with old
Blowers’s voice grating away about predicates and subjunctives and relative clauses, and
all that’s in my mind is the backwater near Burford Weir and the green pool under the
willows with the dace gliding to and fro. And then the terrific rush on bicycles after tea,
to Chamford Hill and down to the river to get in an hour’s fishing before dark. The still
summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are
rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and
never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish
swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would
change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark. And then it was always ‘Let’s
have five minutes more’, and then ‘Just five minutes more’, until in the end you had to
walk your bike into the town because Towler, the copper, was prowling round and you
could be ‘had up’ for riding without a light. And the times in the summer holidays when
we went out to make a day of it with boiled eggs and bread and butter and a bottle of
lemonade, and fished and bathed and then fished again and did occasionally catch
something. At night you’d come home with filthy hands so hungry that you’d eaten what
was left of your bread paste, with three or four smelly dace wrapped up in your
handkerchief. Mother always refused to cook the fish I brought home. She would never
allow that river fish were edible, except trout and salmon. ‘Nasty muddy things’, she
called them. The fish I remember best of all are the ones I didn’t catch. Especially the
monstrous fish you always used to see when you went for a walk along the towpath on
Sunday afternoons and hadn’t a rod with you. There was no fishing on Sundays, even the
Thames Conservancy Board didn’t allow it. On Sundays you had to go for what was
called a ‘nice walk’ in your thick black suit and the Eton collar that sawed your head off.
It was on a Sunday that I saw a pike a yard long asleep in shallow water by the bank and
nearly got him with a stone. And sometimes in the green pools on the edge of the reeds
you’d see a huge Thames trout go sailing past. The trout grow to vast sizes in the
Thames, but they’re practically never caught. They say that one of the real Thames
fishennen, the old bottle-nosed blokes that you see muffled up in overcoats on camp-
stools with twenty-foot roach-poles at all seasons of the year, will willingly give up a
year of his life to catching a Thames trout. I don’t blame them, I see their point entirely,
and still better I saw it then.
Of course other things were happening. I grew three inches in a year, got my long
trousers, won some prizes at school, went to Confirmation classes, told dirty stories, took
to reading, and had crazes for white mice, fretwork, and postage stamps. But it’s always
fishing that I remember. Summer days, and the flat water- meadows and the blue hills in
the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of
deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking
round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking
about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know
that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster. I’ll tell you
about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it
out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all
that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way
poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.
A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape,
doesn’t give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being
good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things — that’s about as near
to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of
longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time
stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for
ever.
I was rather an ugly little boy, with butter-coloured hair which was always cropped short
except for a quiff in front. I don’t idealize my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no
wish to be young again. Most of the things I used to care for would leave me something
more than cold. I don’t care if I never see a cricket ball again, and I wouldn’t give you
threepence for a hundredweight of sweets. But I’ve still got, I’ve always had, that
peculiar feeling for fishing.
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did. Neither us went
there till we were nine. It meant a four-mile bike ride morning and evening, and Mother
was scared of allowing us among the traffic, which by that time included a very few
motor- cars.
For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs Howlett. Most of the
shopkeepers’ children went there, to save them from the shame and come-down of going
to the board school, though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old imposter and
worse than useless as a teacher. She was over seventy, she was very deaf, she could
hardly see through her spectacles, and all she owned in the way of equipment was a cane,
a blackboard, a few dog- eared grammar books, and a couple of dozen smelly slates. She
could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and played truant as often
as they felt like it. Once there was a frightful scandal cause a boy put his hand up a girl’s
dress, a thing I didn’t understand at the time. Mother Howlett succeeded in hushing it up.
When you did something particularly bad her formula was ‘I’ll tell your father’, and on
very rare occasions she did so. But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren’t do
it too often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so old and clumsy
that it was easy to dodge.
Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who called themselves the
Black Hand. The leader was Sid Lovegrove, the saddler’s younger son, who was about
thirteen, and there were two other shopkeepers’ sons, an errand boy from the brewery,
and two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with the gang for a
couple of hours. The fann lads were great lumps bursting out of corduroy breeches, with
very broad accents and rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were
tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of the others. One of
them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a rabbit in his hands occasionally. If he saw
one lying in the grass he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle. There was a big
social distinction between the shopkeepers’ sons and the sons of labourers and farm-
hands, but the local boys didn’t usually pay much attention to it till they were about
sixteen. The gang had a secret password and an ‘ordeal’ which included cutting your
finger and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be frightful
desperadoes. Certainly they managed to make a nuisance of themselves, broke windows
chased cows, tore the knockers off doors, and stole fruit by the hundredweight.
Sometimes in winter they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the
farmers would let them. They all had catapults and squailers, and they were always
saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those days cost five shillings, but the savings
never amounted to more than about threepence. In summer they used to go fishing and
bird- nesting. When Joe was at Mrs Howlett’s he used to cut school at least once a week,
and even at the Grammar School he managed it about once a fortnight. There was a boy
at the Grammar School, an auctioneer’s son, who could copy any handwriting and for a
penny he’d forge a letter from your mother saying you’d been ill yesterday. Of course I
was wild to join the Black Hand, but Joe always choked me off and said they didn’t want
any blasted kids hanging round.
It was the thought of going fishing that really appealed to me. At eight years old I hadn’t
yet been fishing, except with a penny net, with which you can sometimes catch a
stickleback. Mother was always terrified of letting us go anywhere near water. She
‘forbade’ fishing, in the way in which parents in those days ‘forbade’ almost everything,
and I hadn’t yet grasped that grownups can’t see round corners. But the thought of fishing
sent me wild with excitement. Many a time I’d been past the pool at the Mill Farm and
watched the small carp basking on the surface, and sometimes under the willow tree at
the corner a great diamond- shaped carp that to my eyes looked enormous — six inches
long, I suppose — would suddenly rise to the surface, gulp down a grub, and sink again.
I’d spent hours gluing my nose against the window of Wallace’s in the High Street,
where fishing tackle and guns and bicycles were sold. I used to he awake on summer
mornings thinking of the tales Joe had told me about fishing, how you mixed bread paste,
how your float gives a bob and plunges under and you feel the rod bending and the fish
tugging at the line. Is it any use talking about it, I wonder — the sort of fairy light that fish
and fishing tackle have in a kid’s eyes? Some kids feel the same about guns and shooting,
some feel it about motor-bikes or aeroplanes or horses. It’s not a thing that you can
explain or rationalize, it’s merely magic. One morning — it was in June and I must have
been eight — I knew that Joe was going to cut school and go out fishing, and I made up
my mind to follow. In some way Joe guessed what I was thinking about, and he started
on me while we were dressing.
‘Now then, young George! Don’t you get thinking you’re coming with the gang today.
You stay back home. ’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t think nothing about it. ’
‘Yes, you did! You thought you were coming with the gang. ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! You stay back home. We don’t want any bloody kids along. ’
Joe had just learned the word ‘bloody’ and was always using it. Father overheard him
once and swore that he’d thrash the life out of Joe, but as usual he didn’t do so. After
breakfast Joe started off on his bike, with his satchel and his Grammar School cap, five
minutes early as he always did when he meant to cut school, and when it was time for me
to leave for Mother Howlett’s I sneaked off and hid in the lane behind the allotments. I
knew the gang were going to the pond at the Mill Farm, and I was going to follow them if
they murdered me for it. Probably they’d give me a hiding, and probably I wouldn’t get
home to dinner, and then Mother would know that I’d cut school and I’d get another
hiding, but I didn’t care. I was just desperate to go fishing with the gang. I was cunning,
too. I allowed Joe plenty of time to make a circuit round and get to the Mill Farm by
road, and then I followed down the lane and skirted round the meadows on the far side of
the hedge, so as to get almost to the pond before the gang saw me. It was a wonderful
June morning. The buttercups were up to my knees. There was a breath of wind just
stirring the tops of the elms, and the great green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and
rich like silk. And it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round me
it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild roses were still in bloom,
and bits of soft white cloud drifting overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the
dim blue masses of the woods round Upper Binfield. And I didn’t give a damn for any of
it. All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp and the gang with their hooks
and lines and bread paste. It was as though they were in paradise and I’d got to join them.
Presently I managed to sneak up on them — four of them, Joe and Sid Lovegrove and the
errand boy and another shopkeeper’s son, Harry Bames I think his name was.
Joe turned and saw me. ‘Christ! ’ he said. ‘It’s the kid. ’ He walked up to me like a tom-cat
that’s going to start a fight. ‘Now then, you! What’d I tell you? You get back ‘ome
double quick. ’
Both Joe and I were inclined to drop our aitches if we were at all excited. I backed away
from him.
‘I’m not going back ‘ome. ’
‘Yes you are. ’
‘Clip his ear, Joe,’ said Sid. ‘We don’t want no kids along. ’
‘ARE you going back ‘ome? ’ said Joe.
‘No. ’
‘Righto, my boy! Right-HO! ’
Then he started on me. The next minute he was chasing me round, catching me one clip
after another. But I didn’t run away from the pool, I ran in circles. Presently he’d caught
me and got me down, and then he knelt on my upper anns and began screwing my ears,
which was his favourite torture and one I couldn’t stand. I was blubbing by this time, but
still I wouldn’t give in and promise to go home. I wanted to stay and go fishing with the
gang. And suddenly the others swung round in my favour and told Joe to get up off my
chest and let me stay if I wanted to. So I stayed after all.
The others had some hooks and lines and floats and a lump of bread paste in a rag, and
we all cut ourselves willow switches from the tree at the comer of the pool. The
farmhouse was only about two hundred yards away, and you had to keep out of sight
because old Brewer was very down on fishing. Not that it made any difference to him, he
only used the pool for watering his cattle, but he hated boys. The others were still jealous
of me and kept telling me to get out of the light and reminding me that I was only a kid
and knew nothing about fishing. They said that I was making such a noise I’d scare all
the fish away, though actually I was making about half as much noise as anyone else
there. Finally they wouldn’t let me sit beside them and sent me to another part of the pool
where the water was shallower and there wasn’t so much shade. They said a kid like me
was sure to keep splashing the water and frighten the fish away. It was a rotten part of the
pool, a part where no fish would ordinarily come. I knew that. I seemed to know by a
kind of instinct the places where a fish would lie. Still, I was fishing at last. I was sitting
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots.
You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters. Then we went round
by the lodge of Binfield House. There was a rumour that somewhere in the grounds there
was a pond with enonnous fish in it, but no one ever dared go inside because old Hodges,
the lodge-keeper who acted as a kind of caretaker, was ‘down’ on boys. He was digging
in his vegetable garden by the lodge when we passed. We cheeked him over the fence
until he chased us off, and then we went down to the Walton Road and cheeked the
carters, keeping on the other side of the hedge so that they couldn’t reach us with their
whips. Beside the Walton Road there was a place that had been a quarry and then a
rubbish dump, and finally had got overgrown with blackberry bushes. There were great
mounds of rusty old tin cans and bicycle frames and saucepans with holes in them and
broken bottles with weeds growing all over them, and we spent nearly an hour and got
ourselves filthy from head to foot routing out iron fence posts, because Harry Bames
swore that the blacksmith in Lower Binfield would pay sixpence a hundredweight for old
iron. Then Joe found a late thrush’s nest with half-fledged chicks in it in a blackberry
bush. After a lot of argument about what to do with them we took the chicks out, had
shots at them with stones, and finally stamped on them. There were four of them, and we
each had one to stamp on. It was getting on towards tea-time now. We knew that old
Brewer would be as good as his word and there was a hiding ahead of us, but we were
getting too hungry to stay out much longer. Finally we trailed home, with one more row
on the way, because when we were passing the allotments we saw a rat and chased it with
sticks, and old Bennet the station-master, who worked at his allotment every night and
was very proud of it, came after us in a tearing rage because we’d trampled on his onion-
bed.
I’d walked ten miles and I wasn’t tired. All day I’d trailed after the gang and tried to do
everything they did, and they’d called me ‘the kid’ and snubbed me as much as they
could, but I’d more or less kept my end up. I had a wonderful feeling inside me, a feeling
you can’t know about unless you’ve had it — but if you’re a man you’ll have had it some
time. I knew that I wasn’t a kid any longer, I was a boy at last. And it’s a wonderful thing
to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can’t catch you, and to chase rats and kill
birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It’s a kind of strong, rank
feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it’s all bound up with
breaking rules and killing things. The white dusty roads, the hot sweaty feeling of one’s
clothes, the smell of fennel and wild peppennint, the dirty words, the sour stink of the
rubbish dump, the taste of fizzy lemonade and the gas that made one belch, the stamping
on the young birds, the feel of the fish straining on the line — it was all part of it. Thank
God I’m a man, because no woman ever has that feeling.
Sure enough, old Brewer had sent round and told everybody. Father looked very glum,
fetched a strap out of the shop, and said he was going to ‘thrash the life out of Joe. But
Joe struggled and yelled and kicked, and in the end Father didn’t get in more than a
couple of whacks at him. However, he got a caning from the headmaster of the Grammar
School next day. I tried to struggle too, but I was small enough for Mother to get me
across her knee, and she gave me what-for with the strap. So I’d had three hidings that
day, one from Joe, one from old Brewer, and one from Mother. Next day the gang
decided that I wasn’t really a member yet and that I’d got to go through the ‘ordeal’ (a
word they’d got out of the Red Indian stories) after all. They were very strict in insisting
that you had to bite the wonn before you swallowed it. Moreover, because I was the
youngest and they were jealous of me for being the only one to catch anything, they all
made out afterwards that the fish I’d caught wasn’t really a big one. In a general way the
tendency of fish, when people talk about them, is to get bigger and bigger, but this one
got smaller and smaller, until to hear the others talk you’d have thought it was no bigger
than a minnow.
But it didn’t matter. I’d been fishing. I’d seen the float dive under the water and felt the
fish tugging at the line, and however many lies they told they couldn’t take that away
from me.
4
For the next seven years, from when I was eight to when I was fifteen, what I chiefly
remember is fishing.
Don’t think that I did nothing else. It’s only that when you look back over a long period
of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else. I left
Mother Howlett’s and went to the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black
cap with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time afterwards my first long
trousers. My first bike was a fixed- wheel — free-wheel bikes were very expensive then.
When you went downhill you put your feet up on the front rests and let the pedals go
whizzing round. That was one of the characteristic sights of the early nineteen-
hundreds — a boy sailing downhill with his head back and his feet up in the air. I went to
the Grammar School in fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me
about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was certainly a
dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a wolf, and at the end of the big
schoolroom he had a glass case with canes in it, which he’d sometimes take out and
swish through the air in a terrifying manner. But to my surprise I did rather well at
school. It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer than Joe, who was two years
older than me and had bullied me ever since he could walk. Actually Joe was an utter
dunce, got the cane about once a week, and stayed somewhere near the bottom of the
school till he was sixteen. My second term I took a prize in arithmetic and another in
some queer stuff that was mostly concerned with pressed flowers and went by the name
of Science, and by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships and
Reading University. Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me in those days, was very
anxious that I should go to ‘college’. There was an idea floating round that I was to be a
schoolteacher and Joe was to be an auctioneer.
But I haven’t many memories connected with school. When I’ve mixed with chaps from
the upper classes, as I did during the war, I’ve been struck by the fact that they never
really get over that frightful drilling they go through at public schools. Either it flattens
them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their lives kicking against it. It wasn’t so
with boys of our class, the sons of shopkeepers and farmers. You went to the Grammar
School and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you weren’t a prole,
but school was chiefly a place that you wanted to get away from. You’d no sentiment of
loyalty, no goofy feeling about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough,
the school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old Boy’s tie and
not even a school song. You had your half-holidays to yourself, because games weren’t
compulsory and as often as not you cut them. We played football in braces, and though it
was considered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary shirt and trousers.
The only game I really cared about was the stump cricket we used to play in the gravel
yard during the break, with a bat made out of a bit of packing case and a compo ball.
But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and dust and boots, and
the stone in the yard that had been a mounting block and was used for sharpening knives
on, and the little baker’s shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the
size of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy Busters and cost a
halfpenny. I did all the things you do at school. I carved my name on a desk and got the
cane for it — you were always caned for it if you were caught, but it was the etiquette that
you had to carve your name. And I got inky lingers and bit my nails and made darts out
of penholders and played conkers and passed round dirty stories and learned to
masturbate and cheeked old Blowers, the English master, and bullied the life out of little
Willy Simeon, the undertaker’s son, who was half- witted and believed everything you
told him. Our favourite trick was to send him to shops to buy things that didn’t exist. All
the old gags — the ha’porth of penny stamps, the rubber hammer, the left-handed
screwdriver, the pot of striped paint — poor Willy fell for all of them. We had grand sport
one afternoon, putting him in a tub and telling him to lift himself up by the handles. He
ended up in an asylum, poor Willy. But it was in the holidays that one really lived.
There were good things to do in those days. In winter we used to borrow a couple of
ferrets — Mother would never let Joe and me keep them at home, ‘nasty smelly things’
she called them — and go round the farms and ask leave to do a bit of ratting. Sometimes
they let us, sometimes they told us to hook it and said we were more trouble than the rats.
Later in winter we’d follow the threshing machine and help kill the rats when they
threshed the stacks. One winter, 1908 it must have been, the Thames flooded and then
froze and there was skating for weeks on end, and Harry Bames broke his collar- bone on
the ice. In early spring we went after squirrels with squailers, and later on we went
birdnesting. We had a theory that birds can’t count and it’s all right if you leave one egg,
but we were cruel little beasts and sometimes we’d just knock the nest down and trample
on the eggs or chicks. There was another game we had when the toads were spawning.
We used to catch toads, ram the nozzle of a bicycle pump up their backsides, and blow
them up till they burst. That’s what boys are like, I don’t know why. In summer we used
to bike over the Burford Weir and bathe. Wally Lovegrove, Sid’s young cousin, was
drowned in 1906. He got tangled in the weeds at the bottom, and when the drag-hooks
brought his body to the surface his face was jet black.
But fishing was the real thing. We went many a time to old Brewer’s pool, and took tiny
carp and tench out of it, and once a whopping eel, and there were other cow-ponds that
had fish in them and were within walking distance on Saturday afternoons. But after we
got bicycles we started fishing in the Thames below Burford Weir. It seemed more
grown-up than fishing in cow-ponds. There were no farmers chasing you away, and there
are thumping fish in the Thames — though, so far as I know, nobody’s ever been known to
catch one.
It’s queer, the feeling I had for fishing — and still have, really. I can’t call myself a
fisherman. I’ve never in my life caught a fish two feet long, and it’s thirty years now
since I’ve had a rod in my hands. And yet when I look back the whole of my boyhood
from eight to fifteen seems to have revolved round the days when we went fishing. Every
detail has stuck clear in my memory. I can remember individual days and individual fish,
there isn’t a cow- pond or a backwater that I can’t see a picture of if I shut my eyes and
think. I could write a book on the technique of fishing. When we were kids we didn’t
have much in the way of tackle, it cost too much and most of our threepence a week
(which was the usual pocket- money in those days) went on sweets and Lardy Busters.
Very small kids generally fish with a bent pin, which is too blunt to be much use, but you
can make a pretty good hook (though of course it’s got no barb) by bending a needle in a
candle flame with a pair of pliers. The farm lads knew how to plait horsehair so that it
was almost as good as gut, and you can take a small fish on a single horsehair. Later we
got to having two-shilling fishing-rods and even reels of sorts. God, what hours I’ve spent
gazing into Wallace’s window! Even the . 410 guns and saloon pistols didn’t thrill me so
much as the fishing tackle. And the copy of Gamage’s catalogue that I picked up
somewhere, on a rubbish dump I think, and studied as though it had been the Bible! Even
now I could give you all the details about gut-substitute and gimp and Limerick hooks
and priests and disgorgers and Nottingham reels and God knows how many other
technicalities.
Then there were the kinds of bait we used to use. In our shop there were always plenty of
mealworms, which were good but not very good. Gentles were better. You had to beg
them off old Gravitt, the butcher, and the gang used to draw lots or do enamena-mina-mo
to decide who should go and ask, because Gravitt wasn’t usually too pleasant about it. He
was a big, rough-faced old devil with a voice like a mastiff, and when he barked, as he
generally did when speaking to boys, all the knives and steels on his blue apron would
give a jingle. You’d go in with an empty treacle-tin in your hand, hang round till any
customers had disappeared and then say very humbly:
‘Please, Mr Gravitt, y’got any gentles today? ’
Generally he’d roar out: ‘What! Gentles! Gentles in my shop! Ain’t seen such a thing in
years. Think I got blow-flies in my shop? ’
He had, of course. They were everywhere. He used to deal with them with a strip of
leather on the end of a stick, with which he could reach out to enonnous distances and
smack a fly into paste. Sometimes you had to go away without any gentles, but as a rule
he’d shout after you just as you were going:
“Ere! Go round the backyard an’ ‘ave a look. P’raps you might find one or two if you
looked careful. ’
You used to find them in little clusters everywhere. Gravitt’s backyard smelt like a
battlefield. Butchers didn’t have refrigerators in those days. Gentles live longer if you
keep them in sawdust.
Wasp grubs are good, though it’s hard to make them stick on the hook, unless you bake
them first. When someone found a wasps’ nest we’d go out at night and pour turpentine
down it and plug up the hole with mud. Next day the wasps would all be dead and you
could dig out the nest and take the grubs. Once something went wrong, the turps missed
the hole or something, and when we took the plug out the wasps, which had been shut up
all night, came out all together with a zoom. We weren’t very badly stung, but it was a
pity there was no one standing by with a stopwatch. Grasshoppers are about the best bait
there is, especially for chub. You stick them on the hook without any shot and just flick
them to and fro on the surface — ‘dapping’, they call it. But you can never get more than
two or three grasshoppers at a time. Greenbottle flies, which are also damned difficult to
catch, are the best bait for dace, especially on clear days. You want to put them on the
hook alive, so that they wriggle. A chub will even take a wasp, but it’s a ticklish job to
put a live wasp on the hook.
God knows how many other baits there were. Bread paste you make by squeezing water
through white bread in a rag. Then there are cheese paste and honey paste and paste with
aniseed in it. Boiled wheat isn’t bad for roach. Redworms are good for gudgeon. You find
them in very old manure heaps. And you also find another kind of worm called a
brandling, which is striped and smells like an earwig, and which is very good bait for
perch. Ordinary earthworms are good for perch. You have to put them in moss to keep
them fresh and lively. If you try to keep them in earth they die. Those brown flies you
find on cowdung are pretty good for roach. You can take a chub on a cherry, so they say,
and I’ve seen a roach taken with a currant out of a bun.
In those days, from the sixteenth of June (when the coarse-fishing season starts) till
midwinter I wasn’t often without a tin of worms or gentles in my pocket. I had some
fights with Mother about it, but in the end she gave in, fishing came off the list of
forbidden things and Father even gave me a two-shilling fishing-rod for Christmas in
1903. Joe was barely fifteen when he started going after girls, and from then on he
seldom came out fishing, which he said was a kid’s game. But there were about half a
dozen others who were as mad on fishing as I was. Christ, those fishing days! The hot
sticky afternoons in the schoolroom when I’ve sprawled across my desk, with old
Blowers’s voice grating away about predicates and subjunctives and relative clauses, and
all that’s in my mind is the backwater near Burford Weir and the green pool under the
willows with the dace gliding to and fro. And then the terrific rush on bicycles after tea,
to Chamford Hill and down to the river to get in an hour’s fishing before dark. The still
summer evening, the faint splash of the weir, the rings on the water where the fish are
rising, the midges eating you alive, the shoals of dace swarming round your hook and
never biting. And the kind of passion with which you’d watch the black backs of the fish
swarming round, hoping and praying (yes, literally praying) that one of them would
change his mind and grab your bait before it got too dark. And then it was always ‘Let’s
have five minutes more’, and then ‘Just five minutes more’, until in the end you had to
walk your bike into the town because Towler, the copper, was prowling round and you
could be ‘had up’ for riding without a light. And the times in the summer holidays when
we went out to make a day of it with boiled eggs and bread and butter and a bottle of
lemonade, and fished and bathed and then fished again and did occasionally catch
something. At night you’d come home with filthy hands so hungry that you’d eaten what
was left of your bread paste, with three or four smelly dace wrapped up in your
handkerchief. Mother always refused to cook the fish I brought home. She would never
allow that river fish were edible, except trout and salmon. ‘Nasty muddy things’, she
called them. The fish I remember best of all are the ones I didn’t catch. Especially the
monstrous fish you always used to see when you went for a walk along the towpath on
Sunday afternoons and hadn’t a rod with you. There was no fishing on Sundays, even the
Thames Conservancy Board didn’t allow it. On Sundays you had to go for what was
called a ‘nice walk’ in your thick black suit and the Eton collar that sawed your head off.
It was on a Sunday that I saw a pike a yard long asleep in shallow water by the bank and
nearly got him with a stone. And sometimes in the green pools on the edge of the reeds
you’d see a huge Thames trout go sailing past. The trout grow to vast sizes in the
Thames, but they’re practically never caught. They say that one of the real Thames
fishennen, the old bottle-nosed blokes that you see muffled up in overcoats on camp-
stools with twenty-foot roach-poles at all seasons of the year, will willingly give up a
year of his life to catching a Thames trout. I don’t blame them, I see their point entirely,
and still better I saw it then.
Of course other things were happening. I grew three inches in a year, got my long
trousers, won some prizes at school, went to Confirmation classes, told dirty stories, took
to reading, and had crazes for white mice, fretwork, and postage stamps. But it’s always
fishing that I remember. Summer days, and the flat water- meadows and the blue hills in
the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of
deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking
round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don’t mistake what I’m talking
about. It’s not that I’m trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know
that’s all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster. I’ll tell you
about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it
out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all
that. Needless to say he’s got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren’t in any way
poetic, they’re merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.
A boy isn’t interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape,
doesn’t give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being
good to eat, he doesn’t know one plant from another. Killing things — that’s about as near
to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there’s that peculiar intensity, the power of
longing for things as you can’t long when you’re grown up, and the feeling that time
stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you’re doing you could go on for
ever.
I was rather an ugly little boy, with butter-coloured hair which was always cropped short
except for a quiff in front. I don’t idealize my childhood, and unlike many people I’ve no
wish to be young again. Most of the things I used to care for would leave me something
more than cold. I don’t care if I never see a cricket ball again, and I wouldn’t give you
threepence for a hundredweight of sweets. But I’ve still got, I’ve always had, that
peculiar feeling for fishing.
