No More Learning

But in the end I had to speak.
I said:

‘Have you been in Lower Binfield long? ’

She started, looked surprised, and didn’t answer. I tried again:

‘I used to live in Lower Binfield myself, a good while ago. ’

Again no answer, or only something that I couldn’t hear. She gave me a kind of frigid
look and then gazed out of the window again. I saw how it was. Too much of a lady to go
in for back-chat with customers. Besides, she probably thought I was trying to get off
with her. What was the good of telling her I’d been born in the house? Even if she
believed it, it wouldn’t interest her. She’d never heard of Samuel Bowling, Corn & Seed
Merchant. I paid the bill and cleared out.



I wandered up to the church. One thing that I’d been half afraid of, and half looking
forward to, was being recognized by people I used to know. But I needn’t have worried,
there wasn’t a face I knew anywhere in the streets. It seemed as if the whole town had got
a new population.

When I got to the church I saw why they’d had to have a new cemetery. The churchyard
was full to the brim, and half the graves had names on them that I didn’t know. But the
names I did know were easy enough to find. I wandered round among the graves. The
sexton had just scythed the grass and there was a smell of summer even there. They were
all alone, all the older folks I’d known. Gravitt the butcher, and Winkle the other
seedsman, and Trew, who used to keep the George, and Mrs Wheeler from the sweet-
shop — they were all lying there. Shooter and Wetherall were opposite one another on
either side of the path, just as if they were still singing at each other across the aisle. So
Wetherall hadn’t got his hundred after all. Bom in ‘43 and ‘departed his life’ in 1928. But
he’d beaten Shooter, as usual. Shooter died in ‘26. What a time old Wetherall must have
had those last two years when there was nobody to sing against him! And old Grimmett
under a huge marble thing shaped rather like a veal-and-ham pie, with an iron railing
round it, and in the comer a whole batch of Simmonses under cheap little crosses. All
gone to dust. Old Hodges with his tobacco-coloured teeth, and Lovegrove with his big
brown beard, and Lady Rampling with the coachman and the tiger, and Harry Barnes’s
aunt who had a glass eye, and Brewer of the Mill Fann with his wicked old face like
something carved out of a nut — nothing left of any of them except a slab of stone and
God knows what underneath.

I found Mother’s grave, and Father’s beside it. Both of them in pretty good repair. The
sexton had kept the grass clipped. Uncle Ezekiel’s was a little way away. They’d levelled
a lot of the older graves, and the old wooden head-pieces, the ones that used to look like
the end of a bedstead, had all been cleared away. What do you feel when you see your
parents’ graves after twenty years? I don’t know what you ought to feel, but I’ll tell you
what I did feel, and that was nothing. Father and Mother have never faded out of my
mind. It’s as if they existed somewhere or other in a kind of eternity, Mother behind the
brown teapot, Father with his bald head a little mealy, and his spectacles and his grey
moustache, fixed for ever like people in a picture, and yet in some way alive. Those
boxes of bones lying in the ground there didn’t seem to have anything to do with them.



Merely, as I stood there, I began to wonder what you feel like when you’re underground,
whether you care much and how soon you cease to care, when suddenly a heavy shadow
swept across me and gave me a bit of a start.

I looked over my shoulder. It was only a bombing plane which had flown between me
and the sun. The place seemed to be creeping with them.

I strolled into the church. For almost the first time since I got back to Lower Binfield I
didn’t have the ghostly feeling, or rather I had it in a different form. Because nothing had
changed. Nothing, except that all the people were gone. Even the hassocks looked the
same. The same dusty, sweetish corpse-smell. And by God! the same hole in the window,
though, as it was evening and the sun was round the other side, the spot of light wasn’t
creeping up the aisle. They’d still got pews — hadn’t changed over to chairs. There was
our pew, and there was the one in front where Wetherall used to bellow against Shooter.
Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan! And the worn stones in the aisle
where you could still half-read the epitaphs of the blokes who lay beneath them. I
squatted down to have a look at the one opposite our pew. I still knew the readable bits of
it by heart. Even the pattern they made seemed to have stuck in my memory. Lord knows
how often I’d read them during the sermon.

Here fon, Gent. ,

of this parif h his juft &

upright

To his manifold private bene

volences he added a diligent


beloved wife

Amelia, by iffue feven

daughters

I remembered how the long S’s used to puzzle me as a kid. Used to wonder whether in
the old days they pronounced their S’s as F’s, and if so, why.


There was a step behind me. I looked up. A chap in a cassock was standing over me. It
was the vicar.



But I mean THE vicar! It was old Betterton, who’d been vicar in the old days — not, as a
matter of fact, ever since I could remember, but since 1904 or thereabouts. I recognized
him at once, though his hair was quite white.

He didn’t recognize me. I was only a fat tripper in a blue suit doing a bit of sightseeing.
He said good evening and promptly started on the usual line of talk — was I interested in
architecture, remarkable old building this, foundations go back to Saxon times and so on
and so forth. And soon he was doddering round, showing me the sights, such as they
were — Nonnan arch leading into the vestry, brass effigy of Sir Roderick Bone who was
killed at the Battle of Newbury. And I followed him with the kind of whipped-dog air
that middle-aged businessmen always have when they’re being shown round a church or
a picture-gallery. But did I tell him that I knew it all already? Did I tell him that I was
Georgie Bowling, son of Samuel Bowling — he’d have remembered my father even if he
didn’t remember me — and that I’d not only listened to his sermons for ten years and gone
to his Confirmation classes, but even belonged to the Lower Binfield Reading Circle and
had a go at Sesame and Lilies just to please him? No, I didn’t. I merely followed him
round, making the kind of mumble that you make when somebody tells you that this or
that is five hundred years old and you can’t think what the hell to say except that it
doesn’t look it. Lrom the moment that I set eyes on him I’d decided to let him think I was
a stranger. As soon as I decently could I dropped sixpence in the Church Expenses box
and bunked.

But why? Why not make contact, now that at last I’d found somebody I knew?

Because the change in his appearance after twenty years had actually frightened me. I
suppose you think I mean that he looked older. But he didn’t! He looked YOUNGER.
And it suddenly taught me something about the passage of time.

I suppose old Betterton would be about sixty-five now, so that when I last saw him he’d
have been about forty-five — my own present age. His hair was white now, and the day he
buried Mother it was a kind of streaky grey, like a shaving-brush. And yet as soon as I
saw him the first thing that struck me was that he looked younger. I’d thought of him as
an old, old man, and after all he wasn’t so very old. As a boy, it occurred to me, all
people over forty had seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was



hardly any difference between them. A man of forty-five had seemed to me older than
this old dodderer of sixty-five seemed now. And Christ! i was forty-five myself. It
frightened me.

So that’s what I look like to chaps of twenty, I thought as I made off between the graves.
Just a poor old hulk. Finished. It was curious. As a rule I don’t care a damn about my age.
Why should I? I’m fat, but I’m strong and healthy. I can do everything I want to do. A
rose smells the same to me now as it did when I was twenty. Ah, but do I smell the same
to the rose? Like an answer a girl, might have been eighteen, came up the churchyard
lane. She had to pass within a yard or two of me. I saw the look she gave me, just a tiny
momentary look. No, not frightened, nor hostile. Only kind of wild, remote, like a wild
animal when you catch its eye. She’d been bom and grown up in those twenty years
while I was away from Lower B infield. All my memories would have been meaningless
to her. Living in a different world from me, like an animal.

I went back to the George. I wanted a drink, but the bar didn’t open for another half-hour.
I hung about for a bit, reading a Sporting and Dramatic of the year before, and presently
the fair- haired dame, the one I thought might be a widow, came in. I had a sudden
desperate yearning to get off with her. Wanted to show myself that there’s life in the old
dog yet, even if the old dog does have to wear false teeth. After all, I thought, if she’s
thirty and I’m forty-five, that’s fair enough. I was standing in front of the empty fireplace,
making believe to wann my bum, the way you do on a summer day. In my blue suit I
didn’t look so bad. A bit fat, no doubt, but distingue. A man of the world. I could pass for
a stockbroker. I put on my toniest accent and said casually:

‘Wonderful June weather we’re having. ’

It was a pretty harmless remark, wasn’t it? Nor in the same class as ‘Haven’t I met you
somewhere before? ’

But it wasn’t a success. She didn’t answer, merely lowered for about half a second the
paper she was reading and gave me a look that would have cracked a window. It was
awful. She had one of those blue eyes that go into you like a bullet. In that split second I
saw how hopelessly I’d got her wrong. She wasn’t the kind of widow with dyed hair who
likes being taken out to dance-halls. She was upper-middle-class, probably an admiral’s



daughter, and been to one of those good schools where they play hockey. And I’d got
myself wrong too. New suit or no new suit, I COULDN’T pass for a stockbroker. Merely
looked like a commercial traveller who’d happened to get hold of a bit of dough. I
sneaked off to the private bar to have a pint or two before dinner.

The beer wasn’t the same. I remember the old beer, the good Thames Valley beer that
used to have a bit of taste in it because it was made out of chalky water. I asked the
barmaid:

‘Have Bessemers’ still got the brewery? ’

‘Bessemers? Oo, NO, sir! They’ve gorn. Oo, years ago — long before we come ‘ere. ’

She was a friendly sort, what I call the elder-sister type of barmaid, thirty-fivish, with a
mild kind of face and the fat arms they develop from working the beer-handle. She told
me the name of the combine that had taken over the brewery. I could have guessed it
from the taste, as a matter of fact. The different bars ran round in a circle with
compartments in between. Across in the public bar two chaps were playing a game of
darts, and in the Jug and Bottle there was a chap I couldn’t see who occasionally put in a
remark in a sepulchral kind of voice. The barmaid leaned her fat elbows on the bar and
had a talk with me. I ran over the names of the people I used to know, and there wasn’t a
single one of them that she’d heard of. She said she’d only been in Lower Binfield five
years. She hadn’t even heard of old Trew, who used to have the George in the old days.

‘I used to live in Lower Binfield myself,’ I told her. ‘A good while back, it was, before
the war. ’

‘Before the war? Well, now! You don’t look that old. ’

‘See some changes, I dessay,’ said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.

‘The town’s grown,’ I said. ‘It’s the factories, I suppose. ’


‘Well, of course they mostly work at the factories. There’s the gramophone works, and
then there’s Truefitt Stockings. But of course they’re making bombs nowadays. ’



I didn’t altogether see why it was of course, but she began telling me about a young
fellow who worked at True lilt’s factory and sometimes came to the George, and he’d told
her that they were making bombs as well as stockings, the two, for some reason I didn’t
understand, being easy to combine. And then she told me about the big military
aerodrome near Walton — that accounted for the bombing planes I kept seeing — and the
next moment we’d started talking about the war, as usual. Funny. It was exactly to escape
the thought of war that I’d come here. But how can you, anyway? It’s in the air you
breathe.

I said it was coming in 1941. The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he reckoned it was a
bad job. The bannaid said it gave her the creeps. She said:

‘It doesn’t seem to do much good, does it, after all said and done? And sometimes I lie
awake at night and hear one of those great things going overhead, and think to myself,
“Well, now, suppose that was to drop a bomb right down on top of me! ” And all this
A. R. P. , and Miss Todgers, she’s the Air Warden, telling you it’ll be all right if you keep
your head and stuff the windows up with newspaper, and they say they’re going to dig a
shelter under the Town Hall. But the way I look at it is, how could you put a gas- mask
on a baby? ’

The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he’d read in the paper that you ought to get into a hot
bath till it was all over. The chaps in the public bar overheard this and there was a bit of a
by-play on the subject of how many people could get into the same bath, and both of
them asked the barmaid if they could share her bath with her. She told them not to get
saucy, and then she went up the other end of the bar and hauled them out a couple more
pints of old and mild. I took a suck at my beer. It was poor stuff. Bitter, they call it. And
it was bitter, right enough, too bitter, a kind of sulphurous taste. Chemicals. They say no
English hops ever go into beer nowadays, they’re all made into chemicals. Chemicals, on
the other hand, are made into beer. I found myself thinking about Uncle Ezekiel, what
he’d have said to beer like this, and what he’d have said about A. R. P. and the buckets of
sand you’re supposed to put the thennite bombs out with.
As the bannaid came back to
my side of the bar I said:


‘By the way, who’s got the Hall nowadays? ’



We always used to call it the Hall, though its name was Binfield House. For a moment
she didn’t seem to understand.


‘The Hall, sir? ’

“E means Binfield ‘Ouse,’ said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.

‘Oh, Binfield House! Oo, I thought you meant the Memorial Hall. It’s Dr Merrall’s got
Binfield House now. ’

‘Dr Merrall? ’

‘Yes, sir. He’s got more than sixty patients up there, they say. ’

‘Patients? Have they turned it into a hospital, or something? ’

‘Well — it’s not what you’d call an ordinary hospital. More of a sanatorium. It’s mental
patients, reely. What they call a Mental Home. ’

A loony-bin!

But after all, what else could you expect?


3

I crawled out of bed with a bad taste in my mouth and my bones creaking.

The fact was that, what with a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, and several
pints in between, besides a brandy or two, I’d had a bit too much to drink the day before.
For several minutes I stood in the middle of the carpet, gazing at nothing in particular and
too done-in to make a move. You know that god-awful feeling you get sometimes in the
early morning. It’s a feeling chiefly in your legs, but it says to you clearer than any words



could do, ‘Why the hell do you go on with it? Chuck it up, old chap! Stick your head in
the gas oven! ’

Then I shoved my teeth in and went to the window. A lovely June day, again, and the sun
was just beginning to slant over the roofs and hit the house-fronts on the other side of the
street. The pink geraniums in the window-boxes didn’t look half bad. Although it was
only about half past eight and this was only a side-street off the market-place there was
quite a crowd of people coming and going. A stream of clerkly-looking chaps in dark
suits with dispatch-cases were hurrying along, all in the same direction, just as if this had
been a London suburb and they were scooting for the Tube, and the schoolkids were
straggling up towards the market- place in twos and threes. I had the same feeling that I’d
had the day before when I saw the jungle of red houses that had swallowed Chamford
Hill. Bloody interlopers! Twenty thousand gate-crashers who didn’t even know my name.
And here was all this new life swarming to and fro, and here was I, a poor old fatty with
false teeth, watching them from a window and mumbling stuff that nobody wanted to
listen to about things that happened thirty and forty years ago. Christ! I thought, I was
wrong to think that I was seeing ghosts. I’m the ghost myself. I’m dead and they’re alive.

But after breakfast — haddock, grilled kidneys, toast and marmalade, and a pot of
coffee — I felt better. The frozen dame wasn’t breakfasting in the dining-room, there was
a nice summery feeling in the air, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that in that blue
flannel suit of mine I looked just a little bit distingue. By God! I thought, if I’m a ghost,
I’ll BE a ghost! I’ll walk. I’ll haunt the old places. And maybe I can work a bit of black
magic on some of these bastards who’ve stolen my home town from me.

I started out, but I’d got no farther than the market-place when I was pulled up by
something I hadn’t expected to see. A procession of about fifty school-kids was marching
down the street in column of fours — quite military, they looked — with a grim-looking
woman marching alongside of them like a sergeant-major. The leading four were
carrying a banner with a red, white, and blue border and BRITONS PREPARE on it in
huge letters. The barber on the comer had come out on to his doorstep to have a look at
them. I spoke to him. He was a chap with shiny black hair and a dull kind of face.


‘What are those kids doing? ’



‘It’s this here air-raid practice,’ he said vaguely. ‘This here A. R. P. Kind of practising,
like. That’s Miss Todgers, that is. ’

I might have guessed it was Miss Todgers. You could see it in her eye. You know the
kind of tough old devil with grey hair and a kippered face that’s always put in charge of
Girl Guide detachments, Y. W. C. A. hostels, and whatnot. She had on a coat and skirt that
somehow looked like a uniform and gave you a strong impression that she was wearing a
Sam Browne belt, though actually she wasn’t. I knew her type. Been in the W. A. A. C. s in
the war, and never had a day’s fun since. This A. R. P. was jam to her. As the kids swung
past I heard her letting out at them with the real sergeant-major yell, ‘Monica! Lift your
feet up! ’ and I saw that the rear four had another banner with a red, white, and blue
border, and in the middle

WE ARE READY. ARE YOU?

‘What do they want to march them up and down for? ’ I said to the barber.

‘I dunno. I s’pose it’s kind of propaganda, like. ’

I knew, of course. Get the kids war-minded. Give us all the feeling that there’s no way
out of it, the bombers are coming as sure as Christmas, so down to the cellar you go and
don’t argue. Two of the great black planes from Walton were zooming over the eastern
end of the town. Christ! I thought, when it starts it won’t surprise us any more than a
shower of rain. Already we’re listening for the first bomb. The barber went on to tell me
that thanks to Miss Todgers ’s efforts the school-kids had been served with their gas-
masks already.

Well, I started to explore the town. Two days I spent just wandering round the old
landmarks, such of them as I could identify. And all that time I never ran across a soul
that knew me. I was a ghost, and if I wasn’t actually invisible, I felt like it.

It was queer, queerer than I can tell you. Did you ever read a story of H. G. Wells’s about
a chap who was in two places at once — that’s to say, he was really in his own home, but
he had a kind of hallucination that he was at the bottom of the sea? He’d been walking
round his room, but instead of the tables and chairs he’d see the wavy waterweed and the



great crabs and cuttlefish reaching out to get him. Well, it was just like that. For hours on
end I’d be walking through a world that wasn’t there. I’d count my paces as I went down
the pavement and think, ‘Yes, here’s where so-and- so’s field begins. The hedge runs
across the street and slap through that house. That petrol pump is really an elm tree. And
here’s the edge of the allotments. And this street (it was a dismal little row of semi-
detached houses called Cumberledge Road, I remember) is the lane where we used to go
with Katie Simmons, and the nut-bushes grew on both sides. ’ No doubt I got the
distances wrong, but the general directions were right. I don’t believe anyone who hadn’t
happened to be bom here would have believed that these streets were fields as little as
twenty years ago. It was as though the countryside had been buried by a kind of volcanic
eruption from the outer suburbs. Nearly the whole of what used to be old Brewer’s land
had been swallowed up in the Council housing estate. The Mill Fann had vanished, the
cow-pond where I caught my first fish had been drained and filled up and built over, so
that I couldn’t even say exactly where it used to stand. It was all houses, houses, little red
cubes of houses all alike, with privet hedges and asphalt paths leading up to the front
door. Beyond the Council Estate the town thinned out a bit, but the jerry-builders were
doing their best. And there were little knots of houses dumped here and there, wherever
anybody had been able to buy a plot of land, and the makeshift roads leading up to the
houses, and empty lots with builders’ boards, and bits of ruined fields covered with
thistles and tin cans.

In the centre of the old town, on the other hand, things hadn’t changed much, so far as
buildings went. A lot of the shops were still doing the same line of trade, although the
names were different. Lillywhite’s was still a draper’s, but it didn’t look too prosperous.
What used to be Gravitt’s, the butcher’s, was now a shop that sold radio parts. Mother
Wheeler’s little window had been bricked over. Grimmett’s was still a grocer’s, but it had
been taken over by the International. It gives you an idea of the power of these big
combines that they could even swallow up a cute old skinflint like Grimmett. But from
what I know of him — not to mention that slap-up tombstone in the churchyard — I bet he
got out while the going was good and had ten to fifteen thousand quid to take to heaven
with him. The only shop that was still in the same hands was Sarazins’, the people who’d
ruined Father. They’d swollen to enormous dimensions, and they had another huge
branch in the new part of the town. But they’d turned into a kind of general store and sold
furniture, drugs, hardware, and ironmongery as well as the old garden stuff.



For the best part of two days I was wandering round, not actually groaning and rattling a
chain, but sometimes feeling that I’d like to. Also I was drinking more than was good for
me. Almost as soon as I got to Lower Binfield I’d started on the booze, and after that the
pubs never seemed to open quite early enough. My tongue was always hanging out of my
mouth for the last half-hour before opening time.

Mind you, I wasn’t in the same mood all the time. Sometimes it seemed to me that it
didn’t matter a damn if Lower Binfield had been obliterated. After all, what had I come
here for, except to get away from the family? There was no reason why I shouldn’t do all
the things I wanted to do, even go fishing if I felt like it. On the Saturday afternoon I even
went to the fishing-tackle shop in the High Street and bought a split-cane rod (I’d always
pined for a split-cane rod as a boy — it’s a little bit dearer than a green- heart) and hooks
and gut and so forth. The atmosphere of the shop cheered me up. Whatever else changes,
fishing-tackle doesn’t — because, of course, fish don’t change either. And the shopman
didn’t see anything funny in a fat middle-aged man buying a fishing-rod. On the contrary,
we had a little talk about the fishing in the Thames and the big chub somebody had
landed the year before last on a paste made of brown bread, honey, and minced boiled
rabbit. I even — though I didn’t tell him what I wanted them for, and hardly even admitted
it to myself — bought the strongest salmon trace he’d got, and some No. 5 roach-hooks,
with an eye to those big carp at Binfield House, in case they still existed.

Most of Sunday morning I was kind of debating it in my mind — should I go fishing, or
shouldn’t I? One moment I’d think, why the hell not, and the next moment it would seem
to me that it was just one of those things that you dream about and don’t ever do. But in
the afternoon I got the car out and drove down to Burford Weir. I thought I’d just have a
look at the river, and tomorrow, if the weather was right, maybe I’d take my new fishing-
rod and put on the old coat and grey flannel bags I had in my suitcase, and have a good
day’s fishing. Three or four days, if I felt like it.

I drove over Chamford Hill. Down at the bottom the road turns off and runs parallel to
the towpath. I got out of the car and walked. Ah! A knot of little red and white bungalows
had sprung up beside the road. Might have expected it, of course. And there seemed to be
a lot of cars standing about. As I got nearer the river I came into the sound — yes, plonk-
tiddle-tiddle-plonk! — yes, the sound of gramphones.



I rounded the bend and came in sight of the towpath. Christ! Another jolt. The place was
black with people. And where the water-meadows used to be — tea-houses, penny-in-the-
slot machines, sweet kiosks, and chaps selling Walls’ Ice-Cream. Might as well have
been at Margate. I remember the old towpath. You could walk along it for miles, and
except for the chaps at the lock gates, and now and again a bargeman mooching along
behind his horse, you’d meet never a soul. When we went fishing we always had the
place to ourselves. Often I’ve sat there a whole afternoon, and a heron might be standing
in the shallow water fifty yards up the bank, and for three or four hours on end there
wouldn’t be anyone passing to scare him away. But where had I got the idea that grown-
up men don’t go fishing? Up and down the bank, as far as I could see in both directions,
there was a continuous chain of men fishing, one every five yards. I wondered how the
hell they could all have got there until it struck me that they must be some fishing-club or
other. And the river was crammed with boats — rowing-boats, canoes, punts, motor-
launches, full of young fools with next to nothing on, all of them screaming and shouting
and most of them with a gramphone aboard as well. The floats of the poor devils who
were trying to fish rocked up and down on the wash of the motor-boats.

I walked a little way. Dirty, choppy water, in spite of the fine day. Nobody was catching
anything, not even minnows. I wondered whether they expected to. A crowd like that
would be enough to scare every fish in creation. But actually, as I watched the floats
rocking up and down among the ice-cream tubs and the paper bags, I doubted whether
there were any fish to catch. Are there still fish in the Thames? I suppose there must be.
And yet I’ll swear the Thames water isn’t the same as it used to be. Its colour is quite
different. Of course you think that’s merely my imagination, but I can tell you it isn’t so.
I know the water has changed. I remember the Thames water as it used to be, a kind of
luminous green that you could see deep into, and the shoals of dace cruising round the
reeds. You couldn’t see three inches into the water now. It’s all brown and dirty, with a
film of oil in it from the motor-boats, not to mention the fag-ends and the paper bags.

After a bit I turned back. Couldn’t stand the noise of the gramophones any longer. Of
course it’s Sunday, I thought. Mightn’t be so bad on a week-day. But after all, I knew I’d
never come back. God rot them, let ‘em keep their bloody river. Wherever I go fishing it
won’t be in the Thames.



The crowds swarmed past me. Crowds of bloody aliens, and nearly all of them young.
Boys and girls larking along in couples. A troop of girls came past, wearing bell-
bottomed trousers and white caps like the ones they wear in the American Navy, with
slogans printed on them. One of them, seventeen she might have been, had PLEASE
KISS ME. I wouldn’t have minded. On an impulse I suddenly turned aside and weighed
myself on one of the penny-in-the-slot machines.