No More Learning

Cookson,
Confectioner and Tobacconist. ’ So Elsie was Mrs Cookson. It was a mangy little shop,
much like the other one where she’d stopped before, but smaller and a lot more flyblown.
Didn’t seem to sell anything except tobacco and the cheapest kinds of sweets. I wondered
what I could buy that would take a minute or two. Then I saw a rack of cheap pipes in the
window, and I went in. I had to brace my nerve up a little before I did it, because there’d
need to be some hard lying if by any chance she recognized me.

She’d disappeared into the room behind the shop, but she came back as I tapped on the
counter. So we were face to face. Ah! no sign. Didn’t recognize me. Just looked at me the
way they do. You know the way small shopkeepers look at their customers — utter lack of
interest.



It was the first time I’d seen her full face, and though I half expected what I saw, it gave
me almost as big a shock as that first moment when I’d recognized her. I suppose when
you look at the face of someone young, even of a child, you ought to be able to foresee
what it’ll look like when it’s old. It’s all a question of the shape of the bones. But if it had
ever occurred to me, when I was twenty and she was twenty-two, to wonder what Elsie
would look like at forty-seven, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind that she could ever look
like THAT. The whole face had kind of sagged, as if it had somehow been drawn
downwards. Do you know that type of middle-aged woman that has a face just like a
bulldog? Great underhung jaw, mouth turned down at the corners, eyes sunken, with
pouches underneath. Exactly like a bulldog. And yet it was the same face, I’d have
known it in a million. Her hair wasn’t completely grey, it was a kind of dirty colour, and
there was much less of it than there used to be. She didn’t know me from Adam. I was
just a customer, a stranger, an uninteresting fat man. It’s queer what an inch or two of fat
can do. I wondered whether I’d changed even more than she had, or whether it was
merely that she wasn’t expecting to see me, or whether — what was the likeliest of all —
she’s simply forgotten my existence.

‘Devening,’ she said, in that listless way they have.

‘I want a pipe,’ I said flatly. ‘A briar pipe. ’

‘A pipe. Now jest lemine see. I know we gossome pipes somewhere. Now where did I —
ah! ‘Ere we are. ’

She took a cardboard box full of pipes from somewhere under the counter. How bad her
accent had got! Or maybe I was just imagining that, because my own standards had
changed? But no, she used to be so ‘superior’, all the girls at Lilywhite’s were so
‘superior’, and she’d been a member of the vicar’s Reading Circle. I swear she never
used to drop her aitches. It’s queer how these women go to pieces once they’re married. I
fiddled among the pipes for a moment and pretended to look them over. Finally I said I’d
like one with an amber mouthpiece.


‘Amber? I don’t know as we got any — ’ she turned towards the back of the shop and
called: ‘Ge-orge! ’



So the other bloke’s name was George too. A noise that sounded something like ‘Ur! ’
came from the back of the shop.


‘Ge-orge! Where ju put that other box of pipes? ’

George came in. He was a small stoutish chap, in shirtsleeves, with a bald head and a big
gingery-coloured soupstrainer moustache. His jaw was working in a ruminative kind of
way. Obviously he’d been interrupted in the middle of his tea. The two of them started
poking round in search of the other box of pipes. It was about five minutes before they
ran it to earth behind some bottles of sweets. It’s wonderful, the amount of litter they
manage to accumulate in these frowsy little shops where the whole stock is worth about
fifty quid.

I watched old Elsie poking about among the litter and mumbling to herself. Do you know
the kind of shuffling, round-shouldered movements of an old woman who’s lost
something? No use trying to describe to you what I felt. A kind of cold, deadly desolate
feeling. You can’t conceive it unless you’ve had it. All I can say is, if there was a girl you
used to care about twenty-five years ago, go and have a look at her now. Then perhaps
you’ll know what I felt.

But as a matter of fact, the thought that was chiefly in my mind was how differently
things turn out from what you expect. The times I’d had with Elsie! The July nights under
the chestnut trees! Wouldn’t you think it would leave some kind of after-effect behind?
Who’d have thought the time would ever come when there would be just no feeling
whatever between us? Here was I and here was she, our bodies might be a yard apart, and
we were just as much strangers as though we’d never met. As for her, she didn’t even
recognize me. If I told her who I was, very likely she wouldn’t remember. And if she did
remember, what would she feel? Just nothing. Probably wouldn’t even be angry because
I’d done the dirty on her. It was as if the whole thing had never happened.

And on the other hand, who’d ever have foreseen that Elsie would end up like this? She’d
seemed the kind of girl who’s bound to go to the devil. I know there’d been at least one
other man before I had met her, and it’s safe to bet there were others between me and the
second George. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she’d had a dozen altogether. I
treated her badly, there’s no question about that, and many a time it had given me a bad



half-hour. She’ll end up on the streets, I used to think, or stick her head in the gas oven.
And sometimes I felt I’d been a bit of a bastard, but other times I reflected (what was true
enough) that if it hadn’t been me it would have been somebody else. But you see the way
things happen, the kind of dull pointless way. How many women really end up on the
streets? A damn sight more end up at the mangle. She hadn’t gone to the bad, or to the
good either. Just ended up like everybody else, a fat old woman muddling about a frowsy
little shop, with a gingery-moustached George to call her own. Probably got a string of
kids as well. Mrs George Cookson. Lived respected and died lamented — and might die
this side of the bankruptcy-court, if she was lucky.

They’d found the box of pipes. Of course there weren’t any with amber mouthpieces
among them.

‘I don’t know as we got any amber ones just at present, sir. Not amber. We gossome nice
vulcanite ones. ’

‘I wanted an amber one,’ I said.

‘We gossome nice pipes ‘ere. ’ She held one out. ‘That’s a nice pipe, now. ‘Alf a crown,
that one is. ’

I took it. Our fingers touched. No kick, no reaction. The body doesn’t remember. And I
suppose you think I bought the pipe, just for old sake’s sake, to put half a crown in
Elsie’s pocket. But not a bit of it. I didn’t want the thing. I don’t smoke a pipe. I’d merely
been making a pretext to come into the shop. I turned it over in my fingers and then put it
down on the counter.

‘Doesn’t matter, I’ll leave it,’ I said. ‘Give me a small Players’. ’

Had to buy something, after all that fuss. George the second, or maybe the third or fourth,
routed out a packet of Players’, still munching away beneath his moustache. I could see
he was sulky because I’d dragged him away from his tea for nothing. But it seemed too
damn silly to waste half a crown. I cleared out and that was the last I ever saw of Elsie.

I went back to the George and had dinner. Afterwards I went out with some vague idea of
going to the pictures, if they were open, but instead I landed up in one of the big noisy



pubs in the new part of the town. There I ran into a couple of chaps from Staffordshire
who were travelling in hardware, and we got talking about the state of trade, and playing
darts and drinking Guinness. By closing time they were both so boozed that I had to take
them home in a taxi, and I was a bit under the weather myself, and the next morning I
woke up with a worse head than ever.


5


But I had to see the pool at Binfield House.

I felt really bad that morning. The fact was that ever since I struck Lower Binfield I’d
been drinking almost continuously from every opening time to every closing time. The
reason, though it hadn’t occurred to me till this minute, was that really there’d been
nothing else to do. That was all my trip had amounted to so far — three days on the booze.

The same as the other morning, I crawled over to the window and watched the bowler
hats and school caps hustling to and fro. My enemies, I thought. The conquering army
that’s sacked the town and covered the ruins with fag-ends and paper bags. I wondered
why I cared. You think, I dare say, that if it had given me a jolt to find Lower Binfield
swollen into a kind of Dagenham, it was merely because I don’t like to see the earth
getting fuller and country turning into town. But it isn’t that at all. I don’t mind towns
growing, so long as they do grow and don’t merely spread like gravy over a tablecloth. I
know that people have got to have somewhere to live, and that if a factory isn’t in one
place it’ll be in another. As for the picturesqueness, the sham countrified stuff, the oak
panels and pewter dishes and copper warming-pans and what- not, it merely gives me the
sick. Whatever we were in the old days, we weren’t picturesque. Mother would never
have seen any sense in the antiques that Wendy had filled our house with. She didn’t like
gateleg tables — she said they ‘caught your legs’. As for pewter, she wouldn’t have it in
the house. ‘Nasty greasy stuff, she called it. And yet, say what you like, there was
something that we had in those days and haven’t got now, something that you probably
can’t have in a streamlined milk-bar with the radio playing. I’d come back to look for it,



and I hadn’t found it. And yet somehow I half believe in it even now, when I hadn’t yet
got my teeth in and my belly was crying out for an aspirin and a cup of tea.

And that started me thinking again about the pool at Binficld House. After seeing what
they’d done to the town, I’d had a feeling you could only describe as fear about going to
see whether the pool still existed. And yet it might, there was no knowing. The town was
smothered under red brick, our house was full of Wendy and her junk, the Thames was
poisoned with motor-oil and paper bags. But maybe the pool was still there, with the
great black fish still cruising round it. Maybe, even, it was still hidden in the woods and
from that day to this no one had discovered it existed. It was quite possible. It was a very
thick bit of wood, full of brambles and rotten brushwood (the beech trees gave way to
oaks round about there, which made the undergrowth thicker), the kind of place most
people don’t care to penetrate. Queerer things have happened.

I didn’t start out till late afternoon. It must have been about half past four when I took the
car out and drove on to the Upper Binfield road. Half-way up the hill the houses thinned
out and stopped and the beech trees began. The road forks about there and I took the
right-hand fork, meaning to make a detour round and come back to Binfield House on the
road. But presently I stopped to have a look at the copse I was driving through. The beech
trees seemed just the same. Lord, how they were the same! I backed the car on to a bit of
grass beside the road, under a fall of chalk, and got out and walked. Just the same. The
same stillness, the same great beds of rustling leaves that seem to go on from year to year
without rotting. Not a creature stirring except the small birds in the tree-tops which you
couldn’t see. It wasn’t easy to believe that that great noisy mess of a town was barely
three miles away. I began to make my way through the little copse, in the direction of
Binfield House. I could vaguely remember how the paths went. And Lord! Yes! The
same chalk hollow where the Black Hand went and had catapult shots, and Sid
Lovegrove told us how babies were born, the day I caught my first fish, pretty near forty
years ago!

As the trees thinned out again you could see the other road and the wall of Binfield
House. The old rotting wooden fence was gone, of course, and they’d put up a high brick
wall with spikes on top, such as you’d expect to see round a loony-bin. I’d puzzled for
some time about how to get into Binfield House until finally it had struck me that I’d



only to tell them my wife was mad and I was looking for somewhere to put her. After that
they’d be quite ready to show me round the grounds. In my new suit I probably looked
prosperous enough to have a wife in a private asylum. It wasn’t till I was actually at the
gate that it occurred to me to wonder whether the pool was still inside the grounds.

The old grounds of Binfield House had covered fifty acres, I suppose, and the grounds of
the loony-bin weren’t likely to be more than five or ten. They wouldn’t want a great pool
of water for the loonies to drown themselves in. The lodge, where old Hodges used to
live, was the same as ever, but the yellow brick wall and the huge iron gates were new.
From the glimpse I got through the gates I wouldn’t have known the place. Gravel walks,
flower-beds, lawns, and a few aimless-looking types wandering about — loonies, I
suppose. I strolled up the road to the right. The pool — the big pool, the one where I used
to fish — was a couple of hundred yards behind the house. It might have been a hundred
yards before I got to the corner of the wall. So the pool was outside the grounds. The
trees seemed to have got much thinner. I could hear children’s voices. And Gosh! there
was the pool.

I stood for a moment, wondering what had happened to it. Then I saw what it was — all
the trees were gone from round its edge. It looked all bare and different, in fact it looked
extraordinarily like the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Kids were playing all round
the edge, sailing boats and paddling, and a few rather older kids were rushing about in
those little canoes which you work by turning a handle. Over to the left, where the old
rotting boat- house used to stand among the reeds, there was a sort of pavilion and a
sweet kiosk, and a huge white notice saying UPPER BINFIELD MODEL YACHT
CLUB.

I looked over to the right. It was all houses, houses, houses. One might as well have been
in the outer suburbs. All the woods that used to grow beyond the pool, and grew so thick
that they were like a kind of tropical jungle, had been shaved flat. Only a few clumps of
trees still standing round the houses.
There were arty- looking houses, another of those
sham-Tudor colonies like the one I’d seen the first day at the top of Chamford Hill, only
more so. What a fool I’d been to imagine that these woods were still the same! I saw how
it was. There was just the one tiny bit of copse, half a dozen acres perhaps, that hadn’t
been cut down, and it was pure chance that I’d walked through it on my way here. Upper



Binfield, which had been merely a name in the old days, had grown into a decent-sized
town. In fact it was merely an outlying chu nk of Lower Binfield.

I wandered up to the edge of the pool. The kids were splashing about and making the
devil of a noise. There seemed to be swarms of them. The water looked kind of dead. No
fish in it now. There was a chap standing watching the kids. He was an oldish chap with a
bald head and a few tufts of white hair, and pince-nez and very sunburnt face. There was
something vaguely queer about his appearance. He was wearing shorts and sandals and
one of those celanese shirts open at the neck, I noticed, but what really struck me was the
look in his eye. He had very blue eyes that kind of twinkled at you from behind his
spectacles. I could see that he was one of those old men who’ve never grown up. They’re
always either health-food cra nk s or else they have something to do with the Boy
Scouts — in either case they’re great ones for Nature and the open air. He was looking at
me as if he’d like to speak.

‘Upper Binfield’ s grown a great deal,’ I said.

He twinkled at me.

‘Grown! My dear sir, we never allow Upper Binfield to grow. We pride ourselves on
being rather exceptional people up here, you know. Just a little colony of us all by
ourselves. No interlopers — te-hee! ’

‘I mean compared with before the war,’ I said. ‘I used to live here as a boy. ’

‘Oh-ah. No doubt. That was before my time, of course. But the Upper Binfield Estate is
something rather special in the way of building estates, you know. Quite a little world of
its own. All designed by young Edward Watkin, the architect. You’ve heard of him, of
course. We live in the midst of Nature up here. No connexion with the town down
there’ — he waved a hand in the direction of Lower Binfield — ‘the dark satanic mills — te-
hee! ’

He had a benevolent old chuckle, and a way of wrinkling his face up, like a rabbit.
Immediately, as though I’d asked him, he began telling me all about the Upper Binfield
Estate and young Edward Watkin, the architect, who had such a feeling for the Tudor,



and was such a wonderful fellow at finding genuine Elizabethan beams in old farmhouses
and buying them at ridiculous prices. And such an interesting young fellow, quite the life
and soul of the nudist parties. He repeated a number of times that they were very
exceptional people in Upper B infield, quite different from Lower Binfield, they were
determined to enrich the countryside instead of defiling it (I’m using his own phrase), and
there weren’t any public houses on the estate.

‘They talk of their Garden Cities. But we call Upper Binfield the Woodland City — te-
hee! Nature! ’ He waved a hand at what was left of the trees. ‘The primeval forest
brooding round us. Our young people grow up amid surroundings of natural beauty. We
are nearly all of us enlightened people, of course. Would you credit that three-quarters of
us up here are vegetarians? The local butchers don’t like us at all — te-hee! And some
quite eminent people live here. Miss Helena Thurloe, the novelist — you’ve heard of her,
of course. And Professor Woad, the psychic research worker. Such a poetic character! He
goes wandering out into the woods and the family can’t find him at mealtimes. He says
he’s walking among the fairies. Do you believe in fairies? I admit — te-hee! — I am just a
wee bit sceptical. But his photographs are most convincing. ’

I began to wonder whether he was someone who’d escaped from Binfield House. But no,
he was sane enough, after a fashion. I knew the type. Vegetarianism, simple life, poetry,
nature -worship, roll in the dew before breakfast. I’d met a few of them years ago in
Ealing. He began to show me round the estate. There was nothing left of the woods. It
was all houses, houses — and what houses! Do you know these faked-up Tudor houses
with the curly roofs and the buttresses that don’t buttress anything, and the rock-gardens
with concrete bird-baths and those red plaster elves you can buy at the florists’? You
could see in your mind’s eye the awful gang of food-cranks and spook-hunters and
simple-lifers with 1,000 pounds a year that lived there. Even the pavements were crazy. I
didn’t let him take me far. Some of the houses made me wish I’d got a hand-grenade in
my pocket. I tried to damp him down by asking whether people didn’t object to living so
near the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t have much effect. Finally I stopped and said:

‘There used to be another pool, besides the big one. It can’t be far from here. ’


‘Another pool? Oh, surely not. I don’t think there was ever another pool. ’



‘They may have drained it off,’ I said. ‘It was a pretty deep pool. It would leave a big pit
behind. ’


For the first time he looked a bit uneasy. He rubbed his nose.

‘Oh-ah. Of course, you must understand our life up here is in some ways primitive. The
simple life, you know. We prefer it so. But being so far from the town has its
inconveniences, of course. Some of our sanitary arrangements are not altogether
satisfactory. The dust-cart only calls once a month, I believe. ’

‘You mean they’ve turned the pool into a rubbish-dump? ’

‘Well, there IS something in the nature of a — ’ he shied at the word rubbish-dump. ‘We
have to dispose of tins and so forth, of course. Over there, behind that clump of trees. ’

We went across there. They’d left a few trees to hid it. But yes, there it was. It was my
pool, all right. They’d drained the water off. It made a great round hole, like an enonnous
well, twenty or thirty feet deep. Already it was half full of tin cans.

I stood looking at the tin cans.

‘It’s a pity they drained it,’ I said. ‘There used to be some big fish in that pool. ’

‘Fish? Oh, I never heard anything about that. Of course we could hardly have a pool of
water here among the houses. The mosquitoes, you know. But it was before my time. ’

‘I suppose these houses have been built a good long time? ’ I said.

‘Oh — ten or fifteen years, I think. ’

‘I used to know this place before the war,’ I said. ‘It was all woods then. There weren’t
any houses except Binfield House. But that little bit of copse over there hasn’t changed. I
walked through it on my way here. ’

‘Ah, that! That is sacrosanct. We have decided never to build in it. It is sacred to the
young people. Nature, you know. ’ He twinkled at me, a kind of roguish look, as if he was
letting me into a little secret: ‘We call it the Pixy Glen. ’



The Pixy Glen. I got rid of him, went back to the car and drove down to Lower Binfield.
The Pixy Glen. And they’d filled my pool up with tin cans. God rot them and bust them!
Say what you like — call it silly, childish, anything — but doesn’t it make you puke
sometimes to see what they’re doing to England, with their bird- baths and their plaster
gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beech woods used to be?

Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what
trees and what men. Not that there’s anything one can do about it, except to wish them
the pox in their guts.

One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill. I’m finished with this notion of getting
back into the past. What’s the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They
don’t exist. Coming up for air! But there isn’t any air. The dustbin that we’re in reaches
up to the stratosphere. All the same, I didn’t particularly care. After all, I thought, I’ve
still got three days left. I’d have a bit of peace and quiet, and stop bothering about what
they’d done to Lower Binfield. As for my idea of going fishing — that was off, of course.
Fishing, indeed! At my age! Really, Hilda was right.

I dumped the car in the garage of the George and walked into the lounge. It was six
o’clock. Somebody had switched on the wireless and the news-broadcast was beginning.
I came through the door just in time to hear the last few words of an S. O. S. And it gave
me a bit of a jolt, I admit. For the words I heard were:

‘ — where his wife, Hilda Bowling, is seriously ill. ’

The next instant the plummy voice went on: ‘Here is another S. O. S. Will Percival Chute,
who was last heard of — ’, but I didn’t wait to hear any more. I just walked straight on.
What made me feel rather proud, when I thought it over afterwards, was that when I
heard those words come out of the loudspeaker I never turned an eyelash. Not even a
pause in my step to let anyone know that I was George Bowling, whose wife Hilda
Bowling was seriously ill. The landlord’s wife was in the lounge, and she knew my name
was Bowling, at any rate she’d seen it in the register. Otherwise there was nobody there
except a couple of chaps who were staying at the George and who didn’t know me from
Adam. But I kept my head. Not a sign to anyone. I merely walked on into the private bar,
which had just opened, and ordered my pint as usual.



I had to think it over. By the time I’d drunk about half the pint I began to get the bearings
of the situation. In the first place, Hilda WASN’T ill, seriously or otherwise. I knew that.
She’d been perfectly well when I came away, and it wasn’t the time of the year for ‘flu or
anything of that kind. She was shamming. Why?

Obviously it was just another of her dodges. I saw how it was. She’d got wind
somehow — trust Hilda! — that I wasn’t really at Birmingham, and this was just her way of
getting me home. Couldn’t bear to think of me any longer with that other woman.
Because of course she’d take it for granted that I was with a woman. Can’t imagine any
other motive. And naturally she assumed that I’d come rushing home as soon as I heard
she was ill.

But that’s just where you’ve got it wrong, I thought to myself as I finished off the pint.
I’m too cute to be caught that way. I remembered the dodges she’d pulled before, and the
extraordinary trouble she’ll take to catch me out. I’ve even known her, when I’d been on
some journey she was suspicious about, check it all up with a Bradshaw and a road-map,
just to see whether I was telling the truth about my movements. And then there was that
time when she followed me all the way to Colchester and suddenly burst in on me at the
Temperance Hotel. And that time, unfortunately, she happened to be right — at least, she
wasn’t, but there were circumstances which made it look as if she was. I hadn’t the
slightest belief that she was ill. In fact, I knew she wasn’t, although I couldn’t say exactly
how.

I had another pint and things looked better. Of course there was a row coming when I got
home, but there’d have been a row anyway. I’ve got three good days ahead of me, I
thought. Curiously enough, now that the things I’d come to look for had turned out not to
exist, the idea of having a bit of holiday appealed to me all the more. Being away from
home — that was the great thing. Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away, as the
hymn puts it. And suddenly I decided that I WOULD have a woman if I felt like it. It
would serve Hilda right for being so dirty-minded, and besides, where’s the sense of
being suspected if it isn’t true?


But as the second pint worked inside me, the thing began to amuse me.