When he
wasn’t
in the tap-
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down.
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
I’m what you might call the
typical Boots Library subscriber, I always fall for the best-seller of the moment (The
Good Companions, Bengal Lancer, Hatter’s Castle — I fell for every one of them), and
I’ve been a member of the Left Book Club for a year or more. And in 1918, when I was
twenty-five, I had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to my
outlook. But nothing is ever like those first years when you suddenly discover that you
can open a penny weekly paper and plunge straight into thieves’ kitchens and Chinese
opium dens and Polynesian islands and the forests of Brazil.
It was from when I was eleven to when I was about sixteen that I got my biggest kick out
of reading. At first it was always the boys’ penny weeklies — little thin papers with vile
print and an illustration in three colours on the cover — and a bit later it was books.
Sherlock Holmes, Dr Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles. And Nat Gould and
Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly
as Nat Gould wrote racing ones. I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated
I’d have had ‘good’ books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth,
and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel
sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle. But there were practically no
books in our house. Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and
Smiles’s Self Help, and I didn’t of my own accord read a ‘good’ book till much later. I’m
not sorry it happened that way. I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of
them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.
The old penny dreadfuls were already going out when I was a kid, and I can barely
remember them, but there was a regular line of boys’ weeklies, some of which still exist.
The Buffalo Bill stories have gone out, I think, and Nat Gould probably isn’t read any
longer, but Nick Carter and Sexton Blake seem to be still the same as ever. The Gem and
the Magnet, if I’m remembering rightly, started about 1905. The B. O. P. was still rather pi
in those days, but Chums, which I think must have started about 1903, was splendid.
Then there was an encyclopedia — I don’t remember its exact name — which was issued in
penny numbers. It never seemed quite worth buying, but a boy at school used to give
away back numbers sometimes. If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the
difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal,
that’s where I learned it from.
Joe never read. He was one of those boys who can go through years of schooling and at
the end of it are unable to read ten lines consecutively. The sight of print made him feel
sick. I’ve seen him pick up one of my numbers of Chums, read a paragraph or two and
then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale
hay. He tried to kick me out of reading, but Mother and Father, who had decided that I
was ‘the clever one’, backed me up. They were rather proud that I showed a taste for
‘book-learning’, as they called it. But it was typical of both of them that they were
vaguely upset by my reading things like Chums and the Union Jack, thought that I ought
to read something ‘improving’ but didn’t know enough about books to be sure which
books were ‘improving’. Finally Mother got hold of a second-hand copy of Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs, which I didn’t read, though the illustrations weren’t half bad.
All through the winter of 1905 I spent a penny on Chums every week. I was following up
their serial story, ‘Donovan the Dauntless’. Donovan the Dauntless was an explorer who
was employed by an American millionaire to fetch incredible things from various comers
of the earth. Sometimes it was diamonds the size of golf balls from the craters of
volcanoes in Africa, sometimes it was petrified mammoths’ tusks from the frozen forests
of Siberia, sometimes it was buried Inca treasures from the lost cities of Peru. Donovan
went on a new journey every week, and he always made good. My favourite place for
reading was the loft behind the yard. Except when Father was getting out fresh sacks of
grain it was the quietest place in the house. There were huge piles of sacks to lie on, and a
sort of plastery smell mixed up with the smell of sainfoin, and bunches of cobwebs in all
the corners, and just over the place where I used to lie there was a hole in the ceiling and
a lath sticking out of the plaster. I can feel the feeling of it now. A winter day, just warm
enough to lie still. I’m lying on my belly with Chums open in front of me. A mouse runs
up the side of a sack like a clockwork toy, then suddenly stops dead and watches me with
his little eyes like tiny jet beads. I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless.
Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent, and the roots of the
mysterious orchid that blooms once in a hundred years are safe in the tin box under my
camp bed. In the forests all round Hopi-Hopi Indians, who paint their teeth scarlet and
skin white men alive, are beating their war-drums. I’m watching the mouse and the
mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell,
and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.
7
That’s all, really.
I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of
when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster, and the chances are that I’ve told you
nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you
don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you. So far I’ve only spoken about the things that
happened to me before I was sixteen. Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the
family. It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what
people call ‘real life’, meaning unpleasantness.
About three days after I’d seen the big carp at Binficld House, Father came in to tea
looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual. He ate his way solemnly
through his tea and didn’t talk much. In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of
eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because
he hadn’t many back teeth left. I was just getting up from table when he called me back.
‘Wait a minute, George, my boy. I got suthing to say to you. Sit down jest a minute.
Mother, you heard what I got to say last night. ’
Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn.
Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal
with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:
‘George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you. I been thinking it over, and it’s about time
you left school. ‘Fraid you’ll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring
home to your mother. I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to
take you away. ’
Of course this was quite according to precedent — his writing to Mr Wicksey before
telling me, I mean. Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged
everything over their children’s heads.
Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations. He’d ‘had bad
times lately’, things had ‘been a bit difficult’, and the upshot was that Joe and I would
have to start earning our living. At that time I didn’t either know or greatly care whether
the business was really in a bad way or not. I hadn’t even enough commercial instinct to
see the reason why things were ‘difficult’. The fact was that Father had been hit by
competition. Sarazins’, the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home
counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield. Six months earlier they’d taken the
lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt
lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas,
it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards’ distance. Sarazins’, besides selling flower seeds,
described themselves as ‘universal poultry and livestock providers’, and apart from wheat
and oats and so forth they went in for patent poultry mixtures, bird-seed done up in fancy
packets, dog-biscuits of all shapes and colours, medicines, embrocations, and
conditioning powders, and branched off into such things as rat- traps, dog-chains,
incubators, sanitary eggs, bird-nesting, bulbs, weed-killer, insecticide, and even, in some
branches, into what they called a ‘livestock department’, meaning rabbits and day-old
chicks. Father, with his dusty old shop and his refusal to stock new lines, couldn’t
compete with that kind of thing and didn’t want to. The tradesmen with their van-horses,
and such of the farmers as dealt with the retail seedsmen, fought shy of Sarazins’, but in
six months they’d gathered in the petty gentry of the neighbourhood, who in those days
had carriages or dogcarts and therefore horses. This meant a big loss of trade for Father
and the other corn merchant, Winkle. I didn’t grasp any of this at the time. I had a boy’s
attitude towards it all. I’d never taken any interest in the business. I’d never or hardly
ever served in the shop, and when, as occasionally happened, Father wanted me to run an
errand or give a hand with something, such as hoisting sacks of grain up to the loft or
down again, I’d always dodged it whenever possible. Boys in our class aren’t such
complete babies as public schoolboys, they know that work is work and sixpence is
sixpence, but it seems natural for a boy to regard his father’s business as a bore. Up till
that time fishing-rods, bicycles, fizzy lemonade, and so forth had seemed to me a good
deal more real than anything that happened in the grown-up world.
Father had already spoken to old Grimmett, the grocer, who wanted a smart lad and was
willing to take me into the shop immediately. Meanwhile Father was going to get rid of
the errand boy, and Joe was to come home and help with the shop till he got a regular job.
Joe had left school some time back and had been more or less loafing ever since. Father
had sometimes talked of ‘getting him into’ the accounts department at the brewery, and
earlier had even had thoughts of making him into an auctioneer. Both were completely
hopeless because Joe, at seventeen, wrote a hand like a ploughboy and couldn’t repeat the
multiplication table. At present he was supposed to be ‘learning the trade’ at a big bicycle
shop on the outskirts of Walton. Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most half-
wits, had a slight mechanical turn, but he was quite incapable of working steadily and
spent all his time loafing about in greasy overalls, smoking Woodbines, getting into
fights, drinking (he’s started that already), getting ‘talked of with one girl after another,
and sticking Father for money. Father was worried, puzzled, and vaguely resentful. I can
see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his
spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty
pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t
understand it. He’d inherited the business from his father, he’d done an honest trade,
worked hard, sold sound goods, swindled nobody — and his profits were going down. He
said a number of times, between sucking at his teeth to get the crumb out, that times were
very bad, trade seemed very slack, he couldn’t think what had come over people, it
wasn’t as if the horses didn’t have to eat. Perhaps it was these here motors, he decided
finally. ‘Nasty smelly things! ’ Mother put in. She was a little worried, and knew that she
ought to be more so. Once or twice while Father was talking there was a far-away look in
her eyes and I could see her lips moving. She was trying to decide whether it should be a
round of beef and carrots tomorrow or another leg of mutton. Except when there was
something in her own line that needed foresight, such as buying linen or saucepans, she
wasn’t really capable of thinking beyond tomorrow’s meals. The shop was giving trouble
and Father was worried — that was about as far as she saw into it. None of us had any
grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and lost money, but was he
really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t
know what was happening to him, he wasn’t capable of foreseeing that these Sarazin
people would systematically under-sell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he?
Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man. All he knew was that times
were bad, trade was very ‘slack’, very ‘slow’ (he kept repeating these phrases), but
probably things would Took up presently’.
It would be nice if I could tell you that I was a great help to my father in his time of
trouble, suddenly proved myself a man, and developed qualities which no one had
suspected in me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you used to read in the uplift
novels of thirty years ago. Or alternatively I’d like to be able to record that I bitterly
resented having to leave school, my eager young mind, yearning for knowledge and
refinement, recoiled from the soulless mechanical job into which they were thrusting
me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you read in the uplift novels today. Both would
be complete bunkum. The truth is that I was pleased and excited at the idea of going to
work, especially when I grasped that Old Grimmett was going to pay me real wages,
twelve shillings a week, of which I could keep four for myself. The big carp at B infield
House, which had filled my mind for three days past, faded right out of it. I’d no
objection to leaving school a few terms early. It generally happened the same way with
boys at our school. A boy was always ‘going to’ go to Reading University, or study to be
an engineer, or ‘go into business’ in London, or run away to sea — and then suddenly, at
two days’ notice, he’d disappear from school, and a fortnight later you’d meet him on a
bicycle, delivering vegetables. Within five minutes of Father telling me that I should have
to leave school I was wondering about the new suit I should wear to go to work in. I
instantly started demanding a ‘grown-up suit’, with a kind of coat that was fashionable at
that time, a ‘cutaway’, I think it was called. Of course both Mother and Father were
scandalized and said they’d ‘never heard of such a thing’. For some reason that I’ve never
fully fathomed, parents in those days always tried to prevent their children wearing
grown-up clothes as long as possible. In every family there was a stand-up fight before a
boy had his first tall collars or a girl put her hair up.
So the conversation veered away from Father’s business troubles and degenerated into a
long, nagging kind of argument, with Father gradually getting angry and repeating over
and over — dropping an aitch now and again, as he was apt to do when he got angry —
‘Well, you can’t ‘ave it. Make up your mind to that — you can’t ‘ave it. ’ So I didn’t have
my ‘cutaway’, but went to work for the first time in a ready-made black suit and a broad
collar in which I looked an overgrown lout. Any distress I felt over the whole business
really arose from that. Joe was even more selfish about it. He was furious at having to
leave the bicycle shop, and for the short time that he remained at home he merely loafed
about, made a nuisance of himself and was no help to Father whatever.
I worked in old Grimmett’ s shop for nearly six years. Grimmett was a fine, upstanding,
white-whiskered old chap, like a rather stouter version of Uncle Ezekiel, and like Uncle
Ezekiel a good Liberal. But he was less of a firebrand and more respected in the town.
He’d trimmed his sails during the Boer War, he was a bitter enemy of trade unions and
once sacked an assistant for possessing a photograph of Keir Hardie, and he was
‘chapel’ — in fact he was a big noise, literally, in the Baptist Chapel, known locally as the
Tin Tab — whereas my family were ‘church’ and Uncle Ezekiel was an infidel at that. Old
Grimmett was a town councillor and an official at the local Liberal Party. With his white
whiskers, his canting talk about liberty of conscience and the Grand Old Man, his
thumping bank balance, and the extempore prayers you could sometimes hear him letting
loose when you passed the Tin Tab, he was a little like a legendary Nonconformist grocer
in the story — you’ve heard it, I expect:
‘James! ’
‘Yessir? ’
‘Have you sanded the sugar? ’
‘Yessir! ’
‘Have you watered the treacle? ’
‘Yessir! ’
‘Then come up to prayers. ’
God knows how often I heard that story whispered in the shop. We did actually start the
day with a prayer before we put up the shutters. Not that old Grimmett sanded the sugar.
He knew that that doesn’t pay. But he was a sharp man in business, he did all the high-
class grocery trade of Lower Binfield and the country round, and he had three assistants
in the shop besides the errand boy, the van-man, and his own daughter (he was a
widower) who acted as cashier. I was the errand boy for my first six months. Then one of
the assistants left to ‘set up’ in Reading and I moved into the shop and wore my first
white apron. I learned to tie a parcel, pack a bag of currants, grind coffee, work the
bacon-slicer, carve ham, put an edge on a knife, sweep the floor, dust eggs without
breaking them, pass off an inferior article as a good one, clean a window, judge a pound
of cheese by eye, open a packing-case, whack a slab of butter into shape, and — what was
a good deal the hardest — remember where the stock was kept. I haven’t such detailed
memories of grocering as I have of fishing, but I remember a good deal. To this day I
know the trick of snapping a bit of string in my fingers. If you put me in front of a bacon-
slicer I could work it better than I can a typewriter. I could spin you some pretty fair
technicalities about grades of China tea and what margarine is made of and the average
weight of eggs and the price of paper bags per thousand.
Well, for more than five years that was me — an alert young chap with a round, pink,
snubby kind of face and butter-coloured hair (no longer cut short but carefully greased
and slicked back in what people used to call a ‘smarm’), hustling about behind the
counter in a white apron with a pencil behind my ear, tying up bags of coffee like
lightning and jockeying the customer along with ‘Yes, ma’am! Certainly, ma’am! AND
the next order, ma’am! ’ in a voice with just a trace of a Cockney accent. Old Grimmett
worked us pretty hard, it was an eleven-hour day except on Thursdays and Sundays, and
Christmas week was a nightmare. Yet it’s a good time to look back on. Don’t think that I
had no ambitions. I knew I wasn’t going to remain a grocer’s assistant for ever, I was
merely ‘learning the trade’. Some time, somehow or other, there’d be enough money for
me to ‘set up’ on my own. That was how people felt in those days. This was before the
war, remember, and before the slumps and before the dole. The world was big enough for
everyone. Anyone could ‘set up in trade’, there was always room for another shop. And
time was slipping on. 1909, 1910, 1911. King Edward died and the papers came out with
a black border round the edge. Two cinemas opened in Walton. The cars got commoner
on the roads and cross-country motor-buses began to run. An aeroplane — a flimsy,
rickety-looking thing with a chap sitting in the middle on a kind of chair — flew over
Lower Binfield and the whole town rushed out of their houses to yell at it. People began
to say rather vaguely that this here German Emperor was getting too big for his boots and
‘it’ (meaning war with Germany) was ‘coming some time’. My wages went gradually up,
until finally, just before the war, they were twenty-eight shillings a week. I paid Mother
ten shillings a week for my board, and later, when times got worse, fifteen shillings, and
even that left me feeling richer than I’ve felt since. I grew another inch, my moustache
began to sprout, I wore button boots and collars three inches high. In church on Sundays,
in my natty dark grey suit, with my bowler hat and black dogskin gloves on the pew
beside me, I looked the perfect gent, so that Mother could hardly contain her pride in me.
In between work and ‘walking out’ on Thursdays, and thinking about clothes and girls, I
had fits of ambition and saw myself developing into a Big Business Man like Lever or
William Whiteley. Between sixteen and eighteen I made serious efforts to ‘improve my
mind’ and train myself for a business career. I cured myself of dropping aitches and got
rid of most of my Cockney accent. (In the Thames Valley the country accents were going
out. Except for the fann lads, nearly everyone who was born later than 1890 talked
Cockney. ) I did a correspondence course with Littleburns’ Commercial Academy, learnt
bookkeeping and business English, read solemnly through a book of frightful blah called
The Art of Salesmanship, and improved my arithmetic and even my handwriting. When I
was as old as seventeen I’ve sat up late at night with my tongue hanging out of my
mouth, practising copperplate by the little oil-lamp on the bedroom table. At times I read
enonnously, generally crime and adventure stories, and sometimes paper-covered books
which were furtively passed round by the chaps at the shop and described as ‘hot’. (They
were translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock. ) But when I was eighteen I suddenly
turned highbrow, got a ticket for the County Library, and began to stodge through books
by Marie Corelli and Hall Caine and Anthony Hope. It was at about that time that I joined
the Lower Binfield Reading Circle, which was run by the vicar and met one evening a
week all through the winter for what was called ‘literary discussion’. Under pressure
from the vicar I read bits of Sesame and Lilies and even had a go at Browning.
And time was slipping away. 1910, 1911, 1912. And Father’s business was going
down — not slumping suddenly into the gutter, but it was going down. Neither Father nor
Mother was ever quite the same after Joe ran away from home. This happened not long
after I went to work at Grimmett’s.
Joe, at eighteen, had grown into an ugly ruffian. He was a hefty chap, much bigger than
the rest of the family, with tremendous shoulders, a big head, and a sulky, lowering kind
of face on which he already had a respectable moustache.
When he wasn’t in the tap-
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down. If anyone came into the shop he’d move aside just
enough to let them pass, and, without taking his hands out of his pockets, yell over his
shoulders ‘Da-ad! Shop! ’ This was as near as he ever got to helping. Father and Mother
said despairingly that they ‘didn’t know what to do with him’, and he was costing the
devil of a lot with his drinking and endless smoking. Fate one night he walked out of the
house and was never heard of again. He’d prised open the till and taken all the money
that was in it, luckily not much, about eight pounds. That was enough to get him a
steerage passage to America. He’d always wanted to go to America, and I think he
probably did so, though we never knew for certain. It made a bit of a scandal in the town.
The official theory was that Joe had bolted because he’d put a girl in the family way.
There was a girl named Sally Chivers who lived in the same street as the Simmonses and
was going to have a baby, and Joe had certainly been with her, but so had about a dozen
others, and nobody knew whose baby it was. Mother and Father accepted the baby theory
and even, in private, used it to excuse their ‘poor boy’ for stealing the eight pounds and
running away. They weren’t capable of grasping that Joe had cleared out because he
couldn’t stand a decent respectable life in a little country town and wanted a life of
loafing, fights, and women. We never heard of him again. Perhaps he went utterly to the
bad, perhaps he was killed in the war, perhaps he merely didn’t bother to write. Luckily
the baby was born dead, so there were no complications. As for the fact that Joe had
stolen the eight pounds. Mother and Father managed to keep it a secret till they died. In
their eyes it was a much worse disgrace than Sally Chivers’s baby.
The trouble over Joe aged Father a great deal. To lose Joe was merely to cut a loss, but it
hurt him and made him ashamed. From that time forward his moustache was much greyer
and he seemed to have grown a lot smaller. Perhaps my memory of him as a little grey
man, with a round, lined, anxious face and dusty spectacles, really dates from that time.
By slow degrees he was getting more and more involved in money worries and less and
less interested in other things. He talked less about politics and the Sunday papers, and
more about the badness of trade. Mother seemed to have shrunk a little, too. In my
childhood I’d kn own her as something vast and overflowing, with her yellow hair and her
beaming face and her enormous bosom, a sort of great opulent creature like the figure-
head of a battleship. Now she’d got smaller and more anxious and older than her years.
She was less lordly in the kitchen, went in more for neck of mutton, worried over the
price of coal, and began to use margarine, a thing which in the old days she’d never have
allowed into the house. After Joe had gone Father had to hire an errand boy again, but
from then on he employed very young boys whom he only kept for a year or two and who
couldn’t lift heavy weights. I sometimes lent him a hand when I was at home. I was too
selfish to do it regularly. I can still see him working his way slowly across the yard, bent
double and almost hidden under an enonnous sack, like a snail under its shell. The huge,
monstrous sack, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, I suppose, pressing his neck and
shoulders almost to the ground, and the anxious, spectacled face looking up from
underneath it. In 1911 he ruptured himself and had to spend weeks in hospital and hire a
temporary manager for the shop, which ate another hole in his capital. A small
shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch, but it isn’t sudden and
obvious like the fate of a working man who gets the sack and promptly finds himself on
the dole. It’s just a gradual chipping away of trade, with little ups and downs, a few
shillings to the bad here, a few sixpences to the good there. Somebody who’s dealt with
you for years suddenly deserts and goes to Sarazins’. Somebody else buys a dozen hens
and gives you a weekly order for com. You can still keep going. You’re still ‘your own
master’, always a little more worried and a little shabbier, with your capital shrinking all
the time. You can go on like that for years, for a lifetime if you’re lucky. Uncle Ezekiel
died in 1911, leaving 120 pounds which must have made a lot of difference to Father. It
wasn’t till 1913 that he had to mortgage his life-insurance policy. That I didn’t hear about
at the time, or I’d have understood what it meant. As it was I don’t think I ever got
further than realizing that Father ‘wasn’t doing well’, trade was ‘slack’, there’d be a bit
longer to wait before I had the money to ‘set up’. Fike Father himself, I looked on the
shop as something permanent, and I was a bit inclined to be angry with him for not
managing things better. I wasn’t capable of seeing, and neither was he nor anyone else,
that he was being slowly ruined, that his business would never pick up again and if he
lived to be seventy he’d certainly end in the workhouse. Many a time I’ve passed
Sarazins’ shop in the market-place and merely thought how much I preferred their slick
window-front to Father’s dusty old shop, with the ‘S. Bowling’ which you could hardly
read, the chipped white lettering, and the faded packets of bird-seed. It didn’t occur to me
that Sarazins’ were tapeworms who were eating him alive. Sometimes I used to repeat to
him some of the stuff I’d been reading in my correspondence-course textbooks, about
salesmanship and modern methods. He never paid much attention. He’d inherited an old-
established business, he’d always worked hard, done a fair trade, and supplied sound
goods, and things would look up presently. It’s a fact that very few shopkeepers in those
days actually ended in the workhouse. With any luck you died with a few pounds still
your own. It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father
first, and Mother too.
1911, 1912, 1913. I tell you it was a good time to be alive. It was late in 1912, through
the vicar’s Reading Circle, that I first met Elsie Waters. Till then, although, like all the
rest of the boys in the town. I’d gone out looking for girls and occasionally managed to
connect up with this girl or that and ‘walk out’ a few Sunday afternoons, I’d never really
had a girl of my own. It’s a queer business, that chasing of girls when you’re about
sixteen. At some recognized part of the town the boys stroll up and down in pairs,
watching the girls, and the girls stroll up and down in pairs, pretending not to notice the
boys, and presently some kind of contact is established and instead of twos they’re
trailing along in fours, all four utterly speechless. The chief feature of those walks — and
it was worse the second time, when you went out with the girl alone — was the ghastly
failure to make any kind of conversation. But Elsie Waters seemed different. The truth
was that I was growing up.
I don’t want to tell the story of myself and Elsie Waters, even if there was any story to
tell. It’s merely that she’s part of the picture, part of ‘before the war’. Before the war it
was always summer — a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it.
the white dusty road stretching out between the chestnut trees, the smell of night-stocks,
the green pools under the willows, the splash of Burford Weir — that’s what I see when I
shut my eyes and think of ‘before the war’, and towards the end Elsie Waters is part of it.
I don’t know whether Elsie would be considered pretty now. She was then. She was tall
for a girl, about as tall as I am, with pale gold, heavy kind of hair which she wore
somehow plaited and coiled round her head, and a delicate, curiously gentle face. She
was one of those girls that always look their best in black, especially the very plain black
dresses they made them wear in the drapery — she worked at Lilywhite’s, the drapers,
though she came originally from London. I suppose she would have been two years older
than I was.
I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a
woman. I don’t mean women in general, I mean an individual woman. I’d met her at the
Reading Circle and hardly noticed her, and then one day I went into Lilywhite’s during
working hours, a thing I wouldn’t normally have been able to do, but as it happened we’d
run out of butter muslin and old Grimmett sent me to buy some. You know the
atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed
feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls
of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of
cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of
her breast against the counter — I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously
feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do
what you wanted with her. She was really deeply feminine, very gentle, very submissive,
the kind that would always do what a man told her, though she wasn’t either small or
weak. She wasn’t even stupid, only rather silent and, at times, dreadfully refined. But in
those days I was rather refined myself.
We were living together for about a year. Of course in a town like Lower Binfield you
could only live together in a figurative sense. Officially we were ‘walking out’, which
was a recognized custom and not quite the same as being engaged. There was a road that
branched off from the road to Upper Binfield and ran along under the edge of the hills.
There was a long stretch of it, nearly a mile, that was quite straight and fringed with
enonnous horse- chestnut trees, and on the grass at the side there was a footpath under
the boughs that was known as Lovers’ Lane. We used to go there on the May evenings,
when the chestnuts were in blossom. Then the short nights came on, and it was light for
hours after we’d left the shop. You know the feeling of a June evening. The kind of blue
twilight that goes on and on, and the air brushing against your face like silk. Sometimes
on Sunday afternoons we went over Chamford Hill and down to the water-meadows
along the Thames. 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the
weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the
feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling
you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the
chance to leam.
It wasn’t till late summer that we began what’s called living together. I’d been too shy
and clumsy to begin, and too ignorant to realize that there’d been others before me. One
Sunday afternoon we went into the beech woods round Upper Binfield. Up there you
could always be alone. I wanted her very badly, and I knew quite well that she was only
waiting for me to begin. Something, I don’t know what, put it into my head to go into the
grounds of Binfield House. Old Hodges, who was past seventy and getting very crusty,
was capable of turning us out, but he’d probably be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. We
slipped through a gap in the fence and down the footpath between the beeches to the big
pool. It was four years or more since I’d been that way. Nothing had changed. Still the
utter solitude, the hidden feeling with the great trees all round you, the old boat-house
rotting among the bulrushes. We lay down in the little grass hollow beside the wild
peppermint, and we were as much alone as if we’d been in Central Africa. I’d kissed her
God knows how many times, and then I’d got up and was wandering about again. I
wanted her very badly, and wanted to take the plunge, only I was half-frightened. And
curiously enough there was another thought in my mind at the same time. It suddenly
struck me that for years I’d meant to come back here and had never come. Now I was so
near, it seemed a pity not to go down to the other pool and have a look at the big carp. I
felt I’d kick myself afterwards if I missed the chance, in fact I couldn’t think why I hadn’t
been back before. The carp were stored away in my mind, nobody knew about them
except me, I was going to catch them some time. Practically they were MY carp. I
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk.
typical Boots Library subscriber, I always fall for the best-seller of the moment (The
Good Companions, Bengal Lancer, Hatter’s Castle — I fell for every one of them), and
I’ve been a member of the Left Book Club for a year or more. And in 1918, when I was
twenty-five, I had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to my
outlook. But nothing is ever like those first years when you suddenly discover that you
can open a penny weekly paper and plunge straight into thieves’ kitchens and Chinese
opium dens and Polynesian islands and the forests of Brazil.
It was from when I was eleven to when I was about sixteen that I got my biggest kick out
of reading. At first it was always the boys’ penny weeklies — little thin papers with vile
print and an illustration in three colours on the cover — and a bit later it was books.
Sherlock Holmes, Dr Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles. And Nat Gould and
Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly
as Nat Gould wrote racing ones. I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated
I’d have had ‘good’ books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth,
and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel
sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle. But there were practically no
books in our house. Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and
Smiles’s Self Help, and I didn’t of my own accord read a ‘good’ book till much later. I’m
not sorry it happened that way. I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of
them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.
The old penny dreadfuls were already going out when I was a kid, and I can barely
remember them, but there was a regular line of boys’ weeklies, some of which still exist.
The Buffalo Bill stories have gone out, I think, and Nat Gould probably isn’t read any
longer, but Nick Carter and Sexton Blake seem to be still the same as ever. The Gem and
the Magnet, if I’m remembering rightly, started about 1905. The B. O. P. was still rather pi
in those days, but Chums, which I think must have started about 1903, was splendid.
Then there was an encyclopedia — I don’t remember its exact name — which was issued in
penny numbers. It never seemed quite worth buying, but a boy at school used to give
away back numbers sometimes. If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the
difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal,
that’s where I learned it from.
Joe never read. He was one of those boys who can go through years of schooling and at
the end of it are unable to read ten lines consecutively. The sight of print made him feel
sick. I’ve seen him pick up one of my numbers of Chums, read a paragraph or two and
then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale
hay. He tried to kick me out of reading, but Mother and Father, who had decided that I
was ‘the clever one’, backed me up. They were rather proud that I showed a taste for
‘book-learning’, as they called it. But it was typical of both of them that they were
vaguely upset by my reading things like Chums and the Union Jack, thought that I ought
to read something ‘improving’ but didn’t know enough about books to be sure which
books were ‘improving’. Finally Mother got hold of a second-hand copy of Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs, which I didn’t read, though the illustrations weren’t half bad.
All through the winter of 1905 I spent a penny on Chums every week. I was following up
their serial story, ‘Donovan the Dauntless’. Donovan the Dauntless was an explorer who
was employed by an American millionaire to fetch incredible things from various comers
of the earth. Sometimes it was diamonds the size of golf balls from the craters of
volcanoes in Africa, sometimes it was petrified mammoths’ tusks from the frozen forests
of Siberia, sometimes it was buried Inca treasures from the lost cities of Peru. Donovan
went on a new journey every week, and he always made good. My favourite place for
reading was the loft behind the yard. Except when Father was getting out fresh sacks of
grain it was the quietest place in the house. There were huge piles of sacks to lie on, and a
sort of plastery smell mixed up with the smell of sainfoin, and bunches of cobwebs in all
the corners, and just over the place where I used to lie there was a hole in the ceiling and
a lath sticking out of the plaster. I can feel the feeling of it now. A winter day, just warm
enough to lie still. I’m lying on my belly with Chums open in front of me. A mouse runs
up the side of a sack like a clockwork toy, then suddenly stops dead and watches me with
his little eyes like tiny jet beads. I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless.
Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent, and the roots of the
mysterious orchid that blooms once in a hundred years are safe in the tin box under my
camp bed. In the forests all round Hopi-Hopi Indians, who paint their teeth scarlet and
skin white men alive, are beating their war-drums. I’m watching the mouse and the
mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell,
and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.
7
That’s all, really.
I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of
when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster, and the chances are that I’ve told you
nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you
don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you. So far I’ve only spoken about the things that
happened to me before I was sixteen. Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the
family. It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what
people call ‘real life’, meaning unpleasantness.
About three days after I’d seen the big carp at Binficld House, Father came in to tea
looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual. He ate his way solemnly
through his tea and didn’t talk much. In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of
eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because
he hadn’t many back teeth left. I was just getting up from table when he called me back.
‘Wait a minute, George, my boy. I got suthing to say to you. Sit down jest a minute.
Mother, you heard what I got to say last night. ’
Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn.
Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal
with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:
‘George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you. I been thinking it over, and it’s about time
you left school. ‘Fraid you’ll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring
home to your mother. I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to
take you away. ’
Of course this was quite according to precedent — his writing to Mr Wicksey before
telling me, I mean. Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged
everything over their children’s heads.
Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations. He’d ‘had bad
times lately’, things had ‘been a bit difficult’, and the upshot was that Joe and I would
have to start earning our living. At that time I didn’t either know or greatly care whether
the business was really in a bad way or not. I hadn’t even enough commercial instinct to
see the reason why things were ‘difficult’. The fact was that Father had been hit by
competition. Sarazins’, the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home
counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield. Six months earlier they’d taken the
lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt
lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas,
it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards’ distance. Sarazins’, besides selling flower seeds,
described themselves as ‘universal poultry and livestock providers’, and apart from wheat
and oats and so forth they went in for patent poultry mixtures, bird-seed done up in fancy
packets, dog-biscuits of all shapes and colours, medicines, embrocations, and
conditioning powders, and branched off into such things as rat- traps, dog-chains,
incubators, sanitary eggs, bird-nesting, bulbs, weed-killer, insecticide, and even, in some
branches, into what they called a ‘livestock department’, meaning rabbits and day-old
chicks. Father, with his dusty old shop and his refusal to stock new lines, couldn’t
compete with that kind of thing and didn’t want to. The tradesmen with their van-horses,
and such of the farmers as dealt with the retail seedsmen, fought shy of Sarazins’, but in
six months they’d gathered in the petty gentry of the neighbourhood, who in those days
had carriages or dogcarts and therefore horses. This meant a big loss of trade for Father
and the other corn merchant, Winkle. I didn’t grasp any of this at the time. I had a boy’s
attitude towards it all. I’d never taken any interest in the business. I’d never or hardly
ever served in the shop, and when, as occasionally happened, Father wanted me to run an
errand or give a hand with something, such as hoisting sacks of grain up to the loft or
down again, I’d always dodged it whenever possible. Boys in our class aren’t such
complete babies as public schoolboys, they know that work is work and sixpence is
sixpence, but it seems natural for a boy to regard his father’s business as a bore. Up till
that time fishing-rods, bicycles, fizzy lemonade, and so forth had seemed to me a good
deal more real than anything that happened in the grown-up world.
Father had already spoken to old Grimmett, the grocer, who wanted a smart lad and was
willing to take me into the shop immediately. Meanwhile Father was going to get rid of
the errand boy, and Joe was to come home and help with the shop till he got a regular job.
Joe had left school some time back and had been more or less loafing ever since. Father
had sometimes talked of ‘getting him into’ the accounts department at the brewery, and
earlier had even had thoughts of making him into an auctioneer. Both were completely
hopeless because Joe, at seventeen, wrote a hand like a ploughboy and couldn’t repeat the
multiplication table. At present he was supposed to be ‘learning the trade’ at a big bicycle
shop on the outskirts of Walton. Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most half-
wits, had a slight mechanical turn, but he was quite incapable of working steadily and
spent all his time loafing about in greasy overalls, smoking Woodbines, getting into
fights, drinking (he’s started that already), getting ‘talked of with one girl after another,
and sticking Father for money. Father was worried, puzzled, and vaguely resentful. I can
see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his
spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty
pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t
understand it. He’d inherited the business from his father, he’d done an honest trade,
worked hard, sold sound goods, swindled nobody — and his profits were going down. He
said a number of times, between sucking at his teeth to get the crumb out, that times were
very bad, trade seemed very slack, he couldn’t think what had come over people, it
wasn’t as if the horses didn’t have to eat. Perhaps it was these here motors, he decided
finally. ‘Nasty smelly things! ’ Mother put in. She was a little worried, and knew that she
ought to be more so. Once or twice while Father was talking there was a far-away look in
her eyes and I could see her lips moving. She was trying to decide whether it should be a
round of beef and carrots tomorrow or another leg of mutton. Except when there was
something in her own line that needed foresight, such as buying linen or saucepans, she
wasn’t really capable of thinking beyond tomorrow’s meals. The shop was giving trouble
and Father was worried — that was about as far as she saw into it. None of us had any
grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and lost money, but was he
really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t
know what was happening to him, he wasn’t capable of foreseeing that these Sarazin
people would systematically under-sell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he?
Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man. All he knew was that times
were bad, trade was very ‘slack’, very ‘slow’ (he kept repeating these phrases), but
probably things would Took up presently’.
It would be nice if I could tell you that I was a great help to my father in his time of
trouble, suddenly proved myself a man, and developed qualities which no one had
suspected in me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you used to read in the uplift
novels of thirty years ago. Or alternatively I’d like to be able to record that I bitterly
resented having to leave school, my eager young mind, yearning for knowledge and
refinement, recoiled from the soulless mechanical job into which they were thrusting
me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you read in the uplift novels today. Both would
be complete bunkum. The truth is that I was pleased and excited at the idea of going to
work, especially when I grasped that Old Grimmett was going to pay me real wages,
twelve shillings a week, of which I could keep four for myself. The big carp at B infield
House, which had filled my mind for three days past, faded right out of it. I’d no
objection to leaving school a few terms early. It generally happened the same way with
boys at our school. A boy was always ‘going to’ go to Reading University, or study to be
an engineer, or ‘go into business’ in London, or run away to sea — and then suddenly, at
two days’ notice, he’d disappear from school, and a fortnight later you’d meet him on a
bicycle, delivering vegetables. Within five minutes of Father telling me that I should have
to leave school I was wondering about the new suit I should wear to go to work in. I
instantly started demanding a ‘grown-up suit’, with a kind of coat that was fashionable at
that time, a ‘cutaway’, I think it was called. Of course both Mother and Father were
scandalized and said they’d ‘never heard of such a thing’. For some reason that I’ve never
fully fathomed, parents in those days always tried to prevent their children wearing
grown-up clothes as long as possible. In every family there was a stand-up fight before a
boy had his first tall collars or a girl put her hair up.
So the conversation veered away from Father’s business troubles and degenerated into a
long, nagging kind of argument, with Father gradually getting angry and repeating over
and over — dropping an aitch now and again, as he was apt to do when he got angry —
‘Well, you can’t ‘ave it. Make up your mind to that — you can’t ‘ave it. ’ So I didn’t have
my ‘cutaway’, but went to work for the first time in a ready-made black suit and a broad
collar in which I looked an overgrown lout. Any distress I felt over the whole business
really arose from that. Joe was even more selfish about it. He was furious at having to
leave the bicycle shop, and for the short time that he remained at home he merely loafed
about, made a nuisance of himself and was no help to Father whatever.
I worked in old Grimmett’ s shop for nearly six years. Grimmett was a fine, upstanding,
white-whiskered old chap, like a rather stouter version of Uncle Ezekiel, and like Uncle
Ezekiel a good Liberal. But he was less of a firebrand and more respected in the town.
He’d trimmed his sails during the Boer War, he was a bitter enemy of trade unions and
once sacked an assistant for possessing a photograph of Keir Hardie, and he was
‘chapel’ — in fact he was a big noise, literally, in the Baptist Chapel, known locally as the
Tin Tab — whereas my family were ‘church’ and Uncle Ezekiel was an infidel at that. Old
Grimmett was a town councillor and an official at the local Liberal Party. With his white
whiskers, his canting talk about liberty of conscience and the Grand Old Man, his
thumping bank balance, and the extempore prayers you could sometimes hear him letting
loose when you passed the Tin Tab, he was a little like a legendary Nonconformist grocer
in the story — you’ve heard it, I expect:
‘James! ’
‘Yessir? ’
‘Have you sanded the sugar? ’
‘Yessir! ’
‘Have you watered the treacle? ’
‘Yessir! ’
‘Then come up to prayers. ’
God knows how often I heard that story whispered in the shop. We did actually start the
day with a prayer before we put up the shutters. Not that old Grimmett sanded the sugar.
He knew that that doesn’t pay. But he was a sharp man in business, he did all the high-
class grocery trade of Lower Binfield and the country round, and he had three assistants
in the shop besides the errand boy, the van-man, and his own daughter (he was a
widower) who acted as cashier. I was the errand boy for my first six months. Then one of
the assistants left to ‘set up’ in Reading and I moved into the shop and wore my first
white apron. I learned to tie a parcel, pack a bag of currants, grind coffee, work the
bacon-slicer, carve ham, put an edge on a knife, sweep the floor, dust eggs without
breaking them, pass off an inferior article as a good one, clean a window, judge a pound
of cheese by eye, open a packing-case, whack a slab of butter into shape, and — what was
a good deal the hardest — remember where the stock was kept. I haven’t such detailed
memories of grocering as I have of fishing, but I remember a good deal. To this day I
know the trick of snapping a bit of string in my fingers. If you put me in front of a bacon-
slicer I could work it better than I can a typewriter. I could spin you some pretty fair
technicalities about grades of China tea and what margarine is made of and the average
weight of eggs and the price of paper bags per thousand.
Well, for more than five years that was me — an alert young chap with a round, pink,
snubby kind of face and butter-coloured hair (no longer cut short but carefully greased
and slicked back in what people used to call a ‘smarm’), hustling about behind the
counter in a white apron with a pencil behind my ear, tying up bags of coffee like
lightning and jockeying the customer along with ‘Yes, ma’am! Certainly, ma’am! AND
the next order, ma’am! ’ in a voice with just a trace of a Cockney accent. Old Grimmett
worked us pretty hard, it was an eleven-hour day except on Thursdays and Sundays, and
Christmas week was a nightmare. Yet it’s a good time to look back on. Don’t think that I
had no ambitions. I knew I wasn’t going to remain a grocer’s assistant for ever, I was
merely ‘learning the trade’. Some time, somehow or other, there’d be enough money for
me to ‘set up’ on my own. That was how people felt in those days. This was before the
war, remember, and before the slumps and before the dole. The world was big enough for
everyone. Anyone could ‘set up in trade’, there was always room for another shop. And
time was slipping on. 1909, 1910, 1911. King Edward died and the papers came out with
a black border round the edge. Two cinemas opened in Walton. The cars got commoner
on the roads and cross-country motor-buses began to run. An aeroplane — a flimsy,
rickety-looking thing with a chap sitting in the middle on a kind of chair — flew over
Lower Binfield and the whole town rushed out of their houses to yell at it. People began
to say rather vaguely that this here German Emperor was getting too big for his boots and
‘it’ (meaning war with Germany) was ‘coming some time’. My wages went gradually up,
until finally, just before the war, they were twenty-eight shillings a week. I paid Mother
ten shillings a week for my board, and later, when times got worse, fifteen shillings, and
even that left me feeling richer than I’ve felt since. I grew another inch, my moustache
began to sprout, I wore button boots and collars three inches high. In church on Sundays,
in my natty dark grey suit, with my bowler hat and black dogskin gloves on the pew
beside me, I looked the perfect gent, so that Mother could hardly contain her pride in me.
In between work and ‘walking out’ on Thursdays, and thinking about clothes and girls, I
had fits of ambition and saw myself developing into a Big Business Man like Lever or
William Whiteley. Between sixteen and eighteen I made serious efforts to ‘improve my
mind’ and train myself for a business career. I cured myself of dropping aitches and got
rid of most of my Cockney accent. (In the Thames Valley the country accents were going
out. Except for the fann lads, nearly everyone who was born later than 1890 talked
Cockney. ) I did a correspondence course with Littleburns’ Commercial Academy, learnt
bookkeeping and business English, read solemnly through a book of frightful blah called
The Art of Salesmanship, and improved my arithmetic and even my handwriting. When I
was as old as seventeen I’ve sat up late at night with my tongue hanging out of my
mouth, practising copperplate by the little oil-lamp on the bedroom table. At times I read
enonnously, generally crime and adventure stories, and sometimes paper-covered books
which were furtively passed round by the chaps at the shop and described as ‘hot’. (They
were translations of Maupassant and Paul de Kock. ) But when I was eighteen I suddenly
turned highbrow, got a ticket for the County Library, and began to stodge through books
by Marie Corelli and Hall Caine and Anthony Hope. It was at about that time that I joined
the Lower Binfield Reading Circle, which was run by the vicar and met one evening a
week all through the winter for what was called ‘literary discussion’. Under pressure
from the vicar I read bits of Sesame and Lilies and even had a go at Browning.
And time was slipping away. 1910, 1911, 1912. And Father’s business was going
down — not slumping suddenly into the gutter, but it was going down. Neither Father nor
Mother was ever quite the same after Joe ran away from home. This happened not long
after I went to work at Grimmett’s.
Joe, at eighteen, had grown into an ugly ruffian. He was a hefty chap, much bigger than
the rest of the family, with tremendous shoulders, a big head, and a sulky, lowering kind
of face on which he already had a respectable moustache.
When he wasn’t in the tap-
room of the George he was loafing in the shop doorway, with his hands dug deep into his
pockets, scowling at the people who passed, except when they happened to be girls, as
though he’d like to knock them down. If anyone came into the shop he’d move aside just
enough to let them pass, and, without taking his hands out of his pockets, yell over his
shoulders ‘Da-ad! Shop! ’ This was as near as he ever got to helping. Father and Mother
said despairingly that they ‘didn’t know what to do with him’, and he was costing the
devil of a lot with his drinking and endless smoking. Fate one night he walked out of the
house and was never heard of again. He’d prised open the till and taken all the money
that was in it, luckily not much, about eight pounds. That was enough to get him a
steerage passage to America. He’d always wanted to go to America, and I think he
probably did so, though we never knew for certain. It made a bit of a scandal in the town.
The official theory was that Joe had bolted because he’d put a girl in the family way.
There was a girl named Sally Chivers who lived in the same street as the Simmonses and
was going to have a baby, and Joe had certainly been with her, but so had about a dozen
others, and nobody knew whose baby it was. Mother and Father accepted the baby theory
and even, in private, used it to excuse their ‘poor boy’ for stealing the eight pounds and
running away. They weren’t capable of grasping that Joe had cleared out because he
couldn’t stand a decent respectable life in a little country town and wanted a life of
loafing, fights, and women. We never heard of him again. Perhaps he went utterly to the
bad, perhaps he was killed in the war, perhaps he merely didn’t bother to write. Luckily
the baby was born dead, so there were no complications. As for the fact that Joe had
stolen the eight pounds. Mother and Father managed to keep it a secret till they died. In
their eyes it was a much worse disgrace than Sally Chivers’s baby.
The trouble over Joe aged Father a great deal. To lose Joe was merely to cut a loss, but it
hurt him and made him ashamed. From that time forward his moustache was much greyer
and he seemed to have grown a lot smaller. Perhaps my memory of him as a little grey
man, with a round, lined, anxious face and dusty spectacles, really dates from that time.
By slow degrees he was getting more and more involved in money worries and less and
less interested in other things. He talked less about politics and the Sunday papers, and
more about the badness of trade. Mother seemed to have shrunk a little, too. In my
childhood I’d kn own her as something vast and overflowing, with her yellow hair and her
beaming face and her enormous bosom, a sort of great opulent creature like the figure-
head of a battleship. Now she’d got smaller and more anxious and older than her years.
She was less lordly in the kitchen, went in more for neck of mutton, worried over the
price of coal, and began to use margarine, a thing which in the old days she’d never have
allowed into the house. After Joe had gone Father had to hire an errand boy again, but
from then on he employed very young boys whom he only kept for a year or two and who
couldn’t lift heavy weights. I sometimes lent him a hand when I was at home. I was too
selfish to do it regularly. I can still see him working his way slowly across the yard, bent
double and almost hidden under an enonnous sack, like a snail under its shell. The huge,
monstrous sack, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, I suppose, pressing his neck and
shoulders almost to the ground, and the anxious, spectacled face looking up from
underneath it. In 1911 he ruptured himself and had to spend weeks in hospital and hire a
temporary manager for the shop, which ate another hole in his capital. A small
shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch, but it isn’t sudden and
obvious like the fate of a working man who gets the sack and promptly finds himself on
the dole. It’s just a gradual chipping away of trade, with little ups and downs, a few
shillings to the bad here, a few sixpences to the good there. Somebody who’s dealt with
you for years suddenly deserts and goes to Sarazins’. Somebody else buys a dozen hens
and gives you a weekly order for com. You can still keep going. You’re still ‘your own
master’, always a little more worried and a little shabbier, with your capital shrinking all
the time. You can go on like that for years, for a lifetime if you’re lucky. Uncle Ezekiel
died in 1911, leaving 120 pounds which must have made a lot of difference to Father. It
wasn’t till 1913 that he had to mortgage his life-insurance policy. That I didn’t hear about
at the time, or I’d have understood what it meant. As it was I don’t think I ever got
further than realizing that Father ‘wasn’t doing well’, trade was ‘slack’, there’d be a bit
longer to wait before I had the money to ‘set up’. Fike Father himself, I looked on the
shop as something permanent, and I was a bit inclined to be angry with him for not
managing things better. I wasn’t capable of seeing, and neither was he nor anyone else,
that he was being slowly ruined, that his business would never pick up again and if he
lived to be seventy he’d certainly end in the workhouse. Many a time I’ve passed
Sarazins’ shop in the market-place and merely thought how much I preferred their slick
window-front to Father’s dusty old shop, with the ‘S. Bowling’ which you could hardly
read, the chipped white lettering, and the faded packets of bird-seed. It didn’t occur to me
that Sarazins’ were tapeworms who were eating him alive. Sometimes I used to repeat to
him some of the stuff I’d been reading in my correspondence-course textbooks, about
salesmanship and modern methods. He never paid much attention. He’d inherited an old-
established business, he’d always worked hard, done a fair trade, and supplied sound
goods, and things would look up presently. It’s a fact that very few shopkeepers in those
days actually ended in the workhouse. With any luck you died with a few pounds still
your own. It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father
first, and Mother too.
1911, 1912, 1913. I tell you it was a good time to be alive. It was late in 1912, through
the vicar’s Reading Circle, that I first met Elsie Waters. Till then, although, like all the
rest of the boys in the town. I’d gone out looking for girls and occasionally managed to
connect up with this girl or that and ‘walk out’ a few Sunday afternoons, I’d never really
had a girl of my own. It’s a queer business, that chasing of girls when you’re about
sixteen. At some recognized part of the town the boys stroll up and down in pairs,
watching the girls, and the girls stroll up and down in pairs, pretending not to notice the
boys, and presently some kind of contact is established and instead of twos they’re
trailing along in fours, all four utterly speechless. The chief feature of those walks — and
it was worse the second time, when you went out with the girl alone — was the ghastly
failure to make any kind of conversation. But Elsie Waters seemed different. The truth
was that I was growing up.
I don’t want to tell the story of myself and Elsie Waters, even if there was any story to
tell. It’s merely that she’s part of the picture, part of ‘before the war’. Before the war it
was always summer — a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it.
the white dusty road stretching out between the chestnut trees, the smell of night-stocks,
the green pools under the willows, the splash of Burford Weir — that’s what I see when I
shut my eyes and think of ‘before the war’, and towards the end Elsie Waters is part of it.
I don’t know whether Elsie would be considered pretty now. She was then. She was tall
for a girl, about as tall as I am, with pale gold, heavy kind of hair which she wore
somehow plaited and coiled round her head, and a delicate, curiously gentle face. She
was one of those girls that always look their best in black, especially the very plain black
dresses they made them wear in the drapery — she worked at Lilywhite’s, the drapers,
though she came originally from London. I suppose she would have been two years older
than I was.
I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a
woman. I don’t mean women in general, I mean an individual woman. I’d met her at the
Reading Circle and hardly noticed her, and then one day I went into Lilywhite’s during
working hours, a thing I wouldn’t normally have been able to do, but as it happened we’d
run out of butter muslin and old Grimmett sent me to buy some. You know the
atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed
feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls
of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of
cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of
her breast against the counter — I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously
feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do
what you wanted with her. She was really deeply feminine, very gentle, very submissive,
the kind that would always do what a man told her, though she wasn’t either small or
weak. She wasn’t even stupid, only rather silent and, at times, dreadfully refined. But in
those days I was rather refined myself.
We were living together for about a year. Of course in a town like Lower Binfield you
could only live together in a figurative sense. Officially we were ‘walking out’, which
was a recognized custom and not quite the same as being engaged. There was a road that
branched off from the road to Upper Binfield and ran along under the edge of the hills.
There was a long stretch of it, nearly a mile, that was quite straight and fringed with
enonnous horse- chestnut trees, and on the grass at the side there was a footpath under
the boughs that was known as Lovers’ Lane. We used to go there on the May evenings,
when the chestnuts were in blossom. Then the short nights came on, and it was light for
hours after we’d left the shop. You know the feeling of a June evening. The kind of blue
twilight that goes on and on, and the air brushing against your face like silk. Sometimes
on Sunday afternoons we went over Chamford Hill and down to the water-meadows
along the Thames. 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the
weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the
feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling
you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the
chance to leam.
It wasn’t till late summer that we began what’s called living together. I’d been too shy
and clumsy to begin, and too ignorant to realize that there’d been others before me. One
Sunday afternoon we went into the beech woods round Upper Binfield. Up there you
could always be alone. I wanted her very badly, and I knew quite well that she was only
waiting for me to begin. Something, I don’t know what, put it into my head to go into the
grounds of Binfield House. Old Hodges, who was past seventy and getting very crusty,
was capable of turning us out, but he’d probably be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. We
slipped through a gap in the fence and down the footpath between the beeches to the big
pool. It was four years or more since I’d been that way. Nothing had changed. Still the
utter solitude, the hidden feeling with the great trees all round you, the old boat-house
rotting among the bulrushes. We lay down in the little grass hollow beside the wild
peppermint, and we were as much alone as if we’d been in Central Africa. I’d kissed her
God knows how many times, and then I’d got up and was wandering about again. I
wanted her very badly, and wanted to take the plunge, only I was half-frightened. And
curiously enough there was another thought in my mind at the same time. It suddenly
struck me that for years I’d meant to come back here and had never come. Now I was so
near, it seemed a pity not to go down to the other pool and have a look at the big carp. I
felt I’d kick myself afterwards if I missed the chance, in fact I couldn’t think why I hadn’t
been back before. The carp were stored away in my mind, nobody knew about them
except me, I was going to catch them some time. Practically they were MY carp. I
actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about
ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles
and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler
hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed
for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back
and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face,
and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked — I don’t kn ow
how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that
you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I
wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it
bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppennint
yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you
might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for
years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the
chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the
beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow
like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl
hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we
sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool
of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the
allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the
war’? I AM sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s
true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got
now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It
isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The fann hands worked
frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a
five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what
was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at
the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were
L2 9s. 6d. , and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the
doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old
Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and
boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren
were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charing, and by
desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw
ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid
tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of
cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and
breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had
no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank
like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so
that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was
it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure.
More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I
suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know
was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things
would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that
what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly
everyone went to church, at any rate in the country — Elsie and I still went to church as a
matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin — and
if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered
that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing
in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way
as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when
civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future
life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive.
You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground — that’s how
people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would
continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground
they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade
seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he
never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very
suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the
end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There
must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to
bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Fovegrove the saddler, with cars
and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the
rhinoceros. And Mother too — Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been
brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-
fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times
were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’,
but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change.
For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple
dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers,
make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion in the
afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea,
bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same
to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they
never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk.
