There were always
bluebottles
buzzing on summer afternoons.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
They had the good old English notions that the red-coats are the
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling. It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard. Father had a slow sort of mind, he’d never taken to ‘book-learning’, as he called it,
and his English wasn’t good. On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he really took
things easy, he’d settle down by the parlour fireplace to have what he called a ‘good read’
at the Sunday paper. His favourite paper was The People — Mother preferred the News of
the World, which she considered had more murders in it. I can see them now. A Sunday
afternoon — summer, of course, always summer — a smell of roast pork and greens still
floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest
murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in
slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through the yards of smudgy print. And
the soft feeling of summer all round you, the geranium in the window, a starling cooing
somewhere, and myself under the table with the B. O. P. , making believe that the
tablecloth is a tent. Afterwards, at tea, as he chewed his way through the radishes and
spring onions, Father would talk in a ruminative kind of way about the stuff he’d been
reading, the fires and shipwrecks and scandals in high society, and these here new flying
machines and the chap (I notice that to this day he turns up in the Sunday papers about
once in three years) who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three
days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice. Father was always a bit
sceptical of this story, and of the new flying machines, otherwise he believed everything
he read. Until 1909 no one in Fower Binfield believed that human beings would ever
learn to fly. The official doctrine was that if God had meant us to fly He’d have given us
wings. Uncle Ezekiel couldn’t help retorting that if God had meant us to ride He’d have
given us wheels, but even he didn’t believe in the new flying machines.
It was only on Sunday afternoons, and perhaps on the one evening a week when he
looked in at the George for a half-pint, that Father turned his mind to such things. At
other times he was always more or less overwhelmed by business. There wasn’t really
such a lot to do, but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the yard,
struggling about with sacks and bales, or in the kind of dusty little cubby-hole behind the
counter in the shop, adding figures up in a notebook with a stump of pencil. He was a
very honest man and a very obliging man, very anxious to provide good stuff and swindle
nobody, which even in those days wasn’t the best way to get on in business. He would
have been just the man for some small official job, a postmaster, for instance, or station-
master of a country station. But he hadn’t either the cheek and enterprise to borrow
money and expand the business, or the imagination to think of new selling-lines. It was
characteristic of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the invention of
a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling’s Mixture it was called, and it was famous
over a radius of nearly five miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel was a
bit of a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little shop. It was his
theory that cage-birds lose their colour because of lack of variation in their diet. In the
yard behind the shop Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about
twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them and mix their seeds
with ordinary canary seed. Jackie, the bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was
supposed to be an advertisement for Bowling’s Mixture. Certainly, unlike most
bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.
Mother was fat ever since I remember her. No doubt it’s from her that I inherit my
pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that makes you get fat.
She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good deal fairer than his and
a tendency to wear black dresses. But except on Sundays I never remember her without
an apron. It would be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never
remember her when she wasn’t cooking. When you look back over a long period you
seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic
attitude. It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing. Well, just as
when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter, with his hair all
mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil which he moistens between his lips, and
just as I remember Uncle Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself
out and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I remember her at the
kitchen table, with her forearms covered with flour, rolling out a lump of dough.
You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days. A huge place, rather dark and
low, with a great beam across the ceiling and a stone floor and cellars underneath.
Everything enormous, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. A vast stone sink which
didn’t have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and going right up to the
ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a ton a month and took God knows how long
to blacklead. Mother at the table rolling out a huge flap of dough. And myself crawling
round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and tin beetle-traps (we
had them in all the dark corners and they used to be baited with beer) and now and again
coming up to the table to try and cadge a bit of food. Mother ‘didn’t hold with’ eating
between meals. You generally got the same answer: ‘Get along with you, now! I’m not
going to have you spoiling your dinner. Your eye’s bigger than your belly. ’ Very
occasionally, however, she’d cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.
I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There’s always a fascination in watching
anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman — a woman who really
knows how to cook, I mean — rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a
satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of
course, that’s exactly what she is. Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were
generally mottled with flour. When she was cooking, all her movements were
wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins did
exactly what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in
a world where she belonged, among things she really understood. Except through the
Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world didn’t really exist for
her. Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as
well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realized this even by the time I was
ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of
England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could
have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know
such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise
polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs
mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d
heard of it. I can almost hear her voice — ‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that!
The IDEA! ’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her
life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.
Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the
loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her
serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and
until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat
and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and
even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s
work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d
have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a
button for himself.
So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything
goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It
was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the
table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All
through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it
vaguely wicked — sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic — to keep later hours.
Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she
would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was
her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals
were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals — boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef
and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog, and jam
roly-poly — with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held
good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to
bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you
made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or
‘answered back’. In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two
Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the
child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from
the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories,
which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give
him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was
too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing
anything with him.
At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day
long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of his son if he
caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these
thrashings actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great
lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that
you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings
never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests, and learned to
smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be
treated rough. Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway.
According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming
was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging
on behind carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All animals were
dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its
special recognized methods of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs
got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you, and
snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny
encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung. All insects stung, except
flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals,
were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were
mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you
colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin- rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of
cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you
washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in
the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway.
Cowcake was poisonous, and so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and
Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for
you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that
Mother always allowed. When she was making plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy
stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were
sick. Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or poisonous, there
were certain things that had mysterious virtues. Raw onions were a cure for almost
everything. A stocking tied round your neck was a cure for a sore throat. Sulphur in a
dog’s drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer’s bowl behind the back door always
had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there year after year, never dissolving.
We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and
between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and ‘read her paper’, as she
called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The
week-day papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a
murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind
whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d
hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr Palmer and Mrs Manning. I think
Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfleld chiefly as a place where murders
were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said,
she just didn’t know how people could BE so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats,
burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone
could DO such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when
Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the
shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out,
most of the shops in the High Street didn’t have them, but Mother felt safe behind them.
All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower
Binfield. The Crippen case — but that was years later, when I was almost grown up —
upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. ‘Gutting his poor wife up and burying her in
the coal cellar! The IDEA! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him! ’ And curiously
enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who
dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and
chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her
eyes.
But what she mostly read on week-days was Hilda’s Home Companion. In those days it
was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, and as a matter of fact it still
exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that
have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but
less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six
months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same
Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing-machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s
chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to
look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader
and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda’s Home Companion. Sitting in
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did. Neither us went
there till we were nine. It meant a four-mile bike ride morning and evening, and Mother
was scared of allowing us among the traffic, which by that time included a very few
motor- cars.
For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs Howlett. Most of the
shopkeepers’ children went there, to save them from the shame and come-down of going
to the board school, though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old imposter and
worse than useless as a teacher. She was over seventy, she was very deaf, she could
hardly see through her spectacles, and all she owned in the way of equipment was a cane,
a blackboard, a few dog- eared grammar books, and a couple of dozen smelly slates. She
could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and played truant as often
as they felt like it. Once there was a frightful scandal cause a boy put his hand up a girl’s
dress, a thing I didn’t understand at the time. Mother Howlett succeeded in hushing it up.
When you did something particularly bad her formula was ‘I’ll tell your father’, and on
very rare occasions she did so. But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren’t do
it too often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so old and clumsy
that it was easy to dodge.
Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who called themselves the
Black Hand. The leader was Sid Lovegrove, the saddler’s younger son, who was about
thirteen, and there were two other shopkeepers’ sons, an errand boy from the brewery,
and two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with the gang for a
couple of hours. The fann lads were great lumps bursting out of corduroy breeches, with
very broad accents and rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were
tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of the others. One of
them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a rabbit in his hands occasionally. If he saw
one lying in the grass he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle. There was a big
social distinction between the shopkeepers’ sons and the sons of labourers and farm-
hands, but the local boys didn’t usually pay much attention to it till they were about
sixteen. The gang had a secret password and an ‘ordeal’ which included cutting your
finger and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be frightful
desperadoes. Certainly they managed to make a nuisance of themselves, broke windows
chased cows, tore the knockers off doors, and stole fruit by the hundredweight.
Sometimes in winter they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the
farmers would let them. They all had catapults and squailers, and they were always
saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those days cost five shillings, but the savings
never amounted to more than about threepence. In summer they used to go fishing and
bird- nesting. When Joe was at Mrs Howlett’s he used to cut school at least once a week,
and even at the Grammar School he managed it about once a fortnight. There was a boy
at the Grammar School, an auctioneer’s son, who could copy any handwriting and for a
penny he’d forge a letter from your mother saying you’d been ill yesterday. Of course I
was wild to join the Black Hand, but Joe always choked me off and said they didn’t want
any blasted kids hanging round.
It was the thought of going fishing that really appealed to me. At eight years old I hadn’t
yet been fishing, except with a penny net, with which you can sometimes catch a
stickleback. Mother was always terrified of letting us go anywhere near water. She
‘forbade’ fishing, in the way in which parents in those days ‘forbade’ almost everything,
and I hadn’t yet grasped that grownups can’t see round corners. But the thought of fishing
sent me wild with excitement. Many a time I’d been past the pool at the Mill Farm and
watched the small carp basking on the surface, and sometimes under the willow tree at
the corner a great diamond- shaped carp that to my eyes looked enormous — six inches
long, I suppose — would suddenly rise to the surface, gulp down a grub, and sink again.
I’d spent hours gluing my nose against the window of Wallace’s in the High Street,
where fishing tackle and guns and bicycles were sold. I used to he awake on summer
mornings thinking of the tales Joe had told me about fishing, how you mixed bread paste,
how your float gives a bob and plunges under and you feel the rod bending and the fish
tugging at the line. Is it any use talking about it, I wonder — the sort of fairy light that fish
and fishing tackle have in a kid’s eyes? Some kids feel the same about guns and shooting,
some feel it about motor-bikes or aeroplanes or horses. It’s not a thing that you can
explain or rationalize, it’s merely magic. One morning — it was in June and I must have
been eight — I knew that Joe was going to cut school and go out fishing, and I made up
my mind to follow. In some way Joe guessed what I was thinking about, and he started
on me while we were dressing.
‘Now then, young George! Don’t you get thinking you’re coming with the gang today.
You stay back home. ’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t think nothing about it. ’
‘Yes, you did! You thought you were coming with the gang. ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! You stay back home. We don’t want any bloody kids along. ’
Joe had just learned the word ‘bloody’ and was always using it. Father overheard him
once and swore that he’d thrash the life out of Joe, but as usual he didn’t do so. After
breakfast Joe started off on his bike, with his satchel and his Grammar School cap, five
minutes early as he always did when he meant to cut school, and when it was time for me
to leave for Mother Howlett’s I sneaked off and hid in the lane behind the allotments. I
knew the gang were going to the pond at the Mill Farm, and I was going to follow them if
they murdered me for it. Probably they’d give me a hiding, and probably I wouldn’t get
home to dinner, and then Mother would know that I’d cut school and I’d get another
hiding, but I didn’t care. I was just desperate to go fishing with the gang. I was cunning,
too. I allowed Joe plenty of time to make a circuit round and get to the Mill Farm by
road, and then I followed down the lane and skirted round the meadows on the far side of
the hedge, so as to get almost to the pond before the gang saw me. It was a wonderful
June morning. The buttercups were up to my knees. There was a breath of wind just
stirring the tops of the elms, and the great green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and
rich like silk. And it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round me
it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild roses were still in bloom,
and bits of soft white cloud drifting overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the
dim blue masses of the woods round Upper Binfield. And I didn’t give a damn for any of
it. All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp and the gang with their hooks
and lines and bread paste. It was as though they were in paradise and I’d got to join them.
Presently I managed to sneak up on them — four of them, Joe and Sid Lovegrove and the
errand boy and another shopkeeper’s son, Harry Bames I think his name was.
Joe turned and saw me. ‘Christ! ’ he said. ‘It’s the kid. ’ He walked up to me like a tom-cat
that’s going to start a fight. ‘Now then, you! What’d I tell you? You get back ‘ome
double quick. ’
Both Joe and I were inclined to drop our aitches if we were at all excited. I backed away
from him.
‘I’m not going back ‘ome. ’
‘Yes you are. ’
‘Clip his ear, Joe,’ said Sid. ‘We don’t want no kids along. ’
‘ARE you going back ‘ome? ’ said Joe.
‘No. ’
‘Righto, my boy! Right-HO! ’
Then he started on me. The next minute he was chasing me round, catching me one clip
after another. But I didn’t run away from the pool, I ran in circles. Presently he’d caught
me and got me down, and then he knelt on my upper anns and began screwing my ears,
which was his favourite torture and one I couldn’t stand. I was blubbing by this time, but
still I wouldn’t give in and promise to go home. I wanted to stay and go fishing with the
gang. And suddenly the others swung round in my favour and told Joe to get up off my
chest and let me stay if I wanted to. So I stayed after all.
The others had some hooks and lines and floats and a lump of bread paste in a rag, and
we all cut ourselves willow switches from the tree at the comer of the pool. The
farmhouse was only about two hundred yards away, and you had to keep out of sight
because old Brewer was very down on fishing. Not that it made any difference to him, he
only used the pool for watering his cattle, but he hated boys. The others were still jealous
of me and kept telling me to get out of the light and reminding me that I was only a kid
and knew nothing about fishing. They said that I was making such a noise I’d scare all
the fish away, though actually I was making about half as much noise as anyone else
there. Finally they wouldn’t let me sit beside them and sent me to another part of the pool
where the water was shallower and there wasn’t so much shade. They said a kid like me
was sure to keep splashing the water and frighten the fish away. It was a rotten part of the
pool, a part where no fish would ordinarily come. I knew that. I seemed to know by a
kind of instinct the places where a fish would lie. Still, I was fishing at last. I was sitting
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots. You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters.
scum of the earth and anyone who joins the Army will die of drink and go straight to hell,
but at the same time they were good patriots, stuck Union Jacks in their windows, and
held it as an article of faith that the English had never been beaten in battle and never
could be. At that time everyone, even the Nonconformists, used to sing sentimental songs
about the thin red line and the soldier boy who died on the battlefield far away. These
soldier boys always used to die ‘when the shot and shell were flying’, I remember. It
puzzled me as a kid. Shot I could understand, but it produced a queer picture in my mind
to think of cockle-shells flying through the air. When Mafeking was relieved the people
nearly yelled the roof off, and there were at any rate times when they believed the tales
about the Boers chucking babies into the air and skewering them on their bayonets. Old
Brewer got so fed up with the kids yelling ‘Krooger! ’ after him that towards the end of
the war he shaved his beard off. The people’s attitude towards the Government was really
the same. They were all true-blue Englishmen and swore that Vicky was the best queen
that ever lived and foreigners were dirt, but at the same time nobody ever thought of
paying a tax, not even a dog-licence, if there was any way of dodging it.
Before and after the war Lower Binfield was a Liberal constituency. During the war there
was a by-election which the Conservatives won. I was too young to grasp what it was all
about, I only knew that I was a Conservative because I liked the blue streamers better
than the red ones, and I chiefly remember it because of a drunken man who fell on his
nose on the pavement outside the George. In the general excitement nobody took any
notice of him, and he lay there for hours in the hot sun with his blood drying round him,
and when it dried it was purple. By the time the 1906 election came along I was old
enough to understand it, more or less, and this time I was a Liberal because everybody
else was. The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a
pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin
storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.
Very early in life, when the Boer War broke out, I remember the big row between Father
and Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel had a little boot-shop in one of the streets off the High
Street, and also did some cobbling. It was a small business and tended to get smaller,
which didn’t matter greatly because Uncle Ezekiel wasn’t married. He was only a half-
brother and much older than Father, twenty years older at least, and for the fifteen years
or so that I knew him he always looked exactly the same. He was a fine-looking old chap,
rather tall, with white hair and the whitest whiskers I ever saw — white as thistledown.
He had a way of slapping his leather apron and standing up very straight — a reaction
from bending over the last, I suppose — after which he’d bark his opinions straight in your
face, ending up with a sort of ghostly cackle. He was a real old nineteenth-century
Liberal, the kind that not only used to ask you what Gladstone said in ‘78 but could tell
you the answer, and one of the very few people in Lower Binfield who stuck to the same
opinions all through the war. He was always denouncing Joe Chamberlain and some gang
of people that he referred to as ‘the Park Lane riff-raff. I can hear him now, having one
of his arguments with Father. ‘Them and their far-flung Empire! Can’t fling it too far for
me. He-he-he! ’ And then Father’s voice, a quiet, worried, conscientious kind of voice,
coming back at him with the white man’s burden and our dooty to the pore blacks whom
these here Boars treated something shameful. For a week or so after Uncle Ezekiel gave it
out that he was a pro-Boer and a Little Englander they were hardly on speaking terms.
They had another row when the atrocity stories started. Father was very worried by the
tales he’d heard, and he tackled Uncle Ezekiel about it. Little Englander or no, surely he
couldn’t think it right for these here Boars to throw babies in the air and catch them on
their bayonets, even if they WERE only nigger babies? But Uncle Ezekiel just laughed in
his face. Father had got it all wrong! It wasn’t the Boars who threw babies in the air, it
was the British soldiers! He kept grabbing hold of me — I must have been about five — to
illustrate. ‘Throw them in the air and skewer them like frogs, I tell you! Same as I might
throw this youngster here! ’ And then he’d swing me up and almost let go of me, and I
had a vivid picture of myself flying through the air and landing plonk on the end of a
bayonet.
Father was quite different from Uncle Ezekiel. I don’t know much about my
grandparents, they were dead before I was born, I only know that my grandfather had
been a cobbler and late in life he married the widow of a seedsman, which was how we
came to have the shop. It was a job that didn’t really suit Father, though he knew the
business inside out and was everlastingly working. Except on Sunday and very
occasionally on week-day evenings I never remember him without meal on the backs of
his hands and in the lines of his face and in what was left of his hair. He’d married when
he was in his thirties and must have been nearly forty when I first remember him. He was
a small man, a sort of grey, quiet little man, always in shirtsleeves and white apron and
always dusty-looking because of the meal. He had a round head, a blunt nose, a rather
bushy moustache, spectacles, and butter-coloured hair, the same colour as mine, but he’d
lost most of it and it was always mealy. My grandfather had bettered himself a good deal
by marrying the seedsman’s widow, and Father had been educated at Walton Grammar
School, where the farmers and the better-off tradesmen sent their sons, whereas Uncle
Ezekiel liked to boast that he’d never been to school in his life and had taught himself to
read by a tallow candle after working hours. But he was a much quicker-witted man than
Father, he could argue with anybody, and he used to quote Carlyle and Spencer by the
yard. Father had a slow sort of mind, he’d never taken to ‘book-learning’, as he called it,
and his English wasn’t good. On Sunday afternoons, the only time when he really took
things easy, he’d settle down by the parlour fireplace to have what he called a ‘good read’
at the Sunday paper. His favourite paper was The People — Mother preferred the News of
the World, which she considered had more murders in it. I can see them now. A Sunday
afternoon — summer, of course, always summer — a smell of roast pork and greens still
floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest
murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in
slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through the yards of smudgy print. And
the soft feeling of summer all round you, the geranium in the window, a starling cooing
somewhere, and myself under the table with the B. O. P. , making believe that the
tablecloth is a tent. Afterwards, at tea, as he chewed his way through the radishes and
spring onions, Father would talk in a ruminative kind of way about the stuff he’d been
reading, the fires and shipwrecks and scandals in high society, and these here new flying
machines and the chap (I notice that to this day he turns up in the Sunday papers about
once in three years) who was swallowed by a whale in the Red Sea and taken out three
days later, alive but bleached white by the whale’s gastric juice. Father was always a bit
sceptical of this story, and of the new flying machines, otherwise he believed everything
he read. Until 1909 no one in Fower Binfield believed that human beings would ever
learn to fly. The official doctrine was that if God had meant us to fly He’d have given us
wings. Uncle Ezekiel couldn’t help retorting that if God had meant us to ride He’d have
given us wheels, but even he didn’t believe in the new flying machines.
It was only on Sunday afternoons, and perhaps on the one evening a week when he
looked in at the George for a half-pint, that Father turned his mind to such things. At
other times he was always more or less overwhelmed by business. There wasn’t really
such a lot to do, but he seemed to be always busy, either in the loft behind the yard,
struggling about with sacks and bales, or in the kind of dusty little cubby-hole behind the
counter in the shop, adding figures up in a notebook with a stump of pencil. He was a
very honest man and a very obliging man, very anxious to provide good stuff and swindle
nobody, which even in those days wasn’t the best way to get on in business. He would
have been just the man for some small official job, a postmaster, for instance, or station-
master of a country station. But he hadn’t either the cheek and enterprise to borrow
money and expand the business, or the imagination to think of new selling-lines. It was
characteristic of him that the only streak of imagination he ever showed, the invention of
a new seed mixture for cage-birds (Bowling’s Mixture it was called, and it was famous
over a radius of nearly five miles) was really due to Uncle Ezekiel. Uncle Ezekiel was a
bit of a bird-fancier and had quantities of goldfinches in his dark little shop. It was his
theory that cage-birds lose their colour because of lack of variation in their diet. In the
yard behind the shop Father had a tiny plot of ground in which he used to grow about
twenty kinds of weed under wire-netting, and he used to dry them and mix their seeds
with ordinary canary seed. Jackie, the bullfinch who hung in the shop-window, was
supposed to be an advertisement for Bowling’s Mixture. Certainly, unlike most
bullfinches in cages, Jackie never turned black.
Mother was fat ever since I remember her. No doubt it’s from her that I inherit my
pituitary deficiency, or whatever it is that makes you get fat.
She was a largish woman, a bit taller than Father, with hair a good deal fairer than his and
a tendency to wear black dresses. But except on Sundays I never remember her without
an apron. It would be an exaggeration, but not a very big one, to say that I never
remember her when she wasn’t cooking. When you look back over a long period you
seem to see human beings always fixed in some special place and some characteristic
attitude. It seems to you that they were always doing exactly the same thing. Well, just as
when I think of Father I remember him always behind the counter, with his hair all
mealy, adding up figures with a stump of pencil which he moistens between his lips, and
just as I remember Uncle Ezekiel, with his ghostly white whiskers, straightening himself
out and slapping his leather apron, so when I think of Mother I remember her at the
kitchen table, with her forearms covered with flour, rolling out a lump of dough.
You know the kind of kitchen people had in those days. A huge place, rather dark and
low, with a great beam across the ceiling and a stone floor and cellars underneath.
Everything enormous, or so it seemed to me when I was a kid. A vast stone sink which
didn’t have a tap but an iron pump, a dresser covering one wall and going right up to the
ceiling, a gigantic range which burned half a ton a month and took God knows how long
to blacklead. Mother at the table rolling out a huge flap of dough. And myself crawling
round, messing about with bundles of firewood and lumps of coal and tin beetle-traps (we
had them in all the dark corners and they used to be baited with beer) and now and again
coming up to the table to try and cadge a bit of food. Mother ‘didn’t hold with’ eating
between meals. You generally got the same answer: ‘Get along with you, now! I’m not
going to have you spoiling your dinner. Your eye’s bigger than your belly. ’ Very
occasionally, however, she’d cut you off a thin strip of candied peel.
I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There’s always a fascination in watching
anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman — a woman who really
knows how to cook, I mean — rolling dough. She’s got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a
satisfied kind of air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of
course, that’s exactly what she is. Mother had thick, pink, strong forearms which were
generally mottled with flour. When she was cooking, all her movements were
wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling-pins did
exactly what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in
a world where she belonged, among things she really understood. Except through the
Sunday papers and an occasional bit of gossip the outside world didn’t really exist for
her. Although she read more easily than Father, and unlike him used to read novelettes as
well as newspapers, she was unbelievably ignorant. I realized this even by the time I was
ten years old. She certainly couldn’t have told you whether Ireland was east or west of
England, and I doubt whether any time up to the outbreak of the Great War she could
have told you who was Prime Minister. Moreover she hadn’t the smallest wish to know
such things. Later on when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise
polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs
mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she’d
heard of it. I can almost hear her voice — ‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that!
The IDEA! ’ Not that she’d have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her
life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.
Even in our own house there were parts where she never set foot. She never went into the
loft behind the yard and very seldom into the shop. I don’t think I ever remember her
serving a customer. She wouldn’t have known where any of the things were kept, and
until they were milled into flour she probably didn’t know the difference between wheat
and oats. Why should she? The shop was Father’s business, it was ‘the man’s work’, and
even about the money side of it she hadn’t very much curiosity. Her job, ‘the woman’s
work’, was to look after the house and the meals and the laundry and the children. She’d
have had a fit if she’d seen Father or anyone else of the male sex trying to sew on a
button for himself.
So far as the meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything
goes like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It
was more like some kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the
table tomorrow morning in much the same way as you knew the sun would rise. All
through her life Mother went to bed at nine and got up at five, and she’d have thought it
vaguely wicked — sort of decadent and foreign and aristocratic — to keep later hours.
Although she didn’t mind paying Katie Simmons to take Joe and me out for walks, she
would never tolerate the idea of having a woman in to help with the housework. It was
her firm belief that a hired woman always sweeps the dirt under the dresser. Our meals
were always ready on the tick. Enormous meals — boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef
and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig’s head, apple pie, spotted dog, and jam
roly-poly — with grace before and after. The old ideas about bringing up children still held
good, though they were going out fast. In theory children were still thrashed and put to
bed on bread and water, and certainly you were liable to be sent away from table if you
made too much noise eating, or choked, or refused something that was ‘good for you’, or
‘answered back’. In practice there wasn’t much discipline in our family, and of the two
Mother was the firmer. Father, though he was always quoting ‘Spare the rod and spoil the
child’, was really much too weak with us, especially with Joe, who was a hard case from
the start. He was always ‘going to’ give Joe a good hiding, and he used to tell us stories,
which I now believe were lies, about the frightful thrashings his own father used to give
him with a leather strap, but nothing ever came of it. By the time Joe was twelve he was
too strong for Mother to get him across her knee, and after that there was no doing
anything with him.
At that time it was still thought proper for parents to say ‘don’t’ to their children all day
long. You’d often hear a man boasting that he’d ‘thrash the life out of his son if he
caught him smoking, or stealing apples, or robbing a bird’s nest. In some families these
thrashings actually took place. Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great
lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that
you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings
never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests, and learned to
smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be
treated rough. Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway.
According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming
was dangerous, climbing trees was dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging
on behind carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All animals were
dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the bullfinch. Every animal had its
special recognized methods of attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs
got into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings, bulls tossed you, and
snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according to Mother, and when I quoted the penny
encyclopedia to the effect that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung. All insects stung, except
flies and blackbeetles. Practically all kinds of food, except the food you had at meals,
were either poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and so were
mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw gooseberries gave you
colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin- rash. If you had a bath after a meal you died of
cramp, if you cut yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if you
washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got warts. Nearly everything in
the shop was poisonous, which was why Mother had put the gate in the doorway.
Cowcake was poisonous, and so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and
Karswood poultry spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad for
you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating between meals that
Mother always allowed. When she was making plum jam she used to let us eat the syrupy
stuff that was skimmed off the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were
sick. Although nearly everything in the world was either dangerous or poisonous, there
were certain things that had mysterious virtues. Raw onions were a cure for almost
everything. A stocking tied round your neck was a cure for a sore throat. Sulphur in a
dog’s drinking water acted as a tonic, and old Nailer’s bowl behind the back door always
had a lump of sulphur in it which stayed there year after year, never dissolving.
We used to have tea at six. By four Mother had generally finished the housework, and
between four and six she used to have a quiet cup of tea and ‘read her paper’, as she
called it. As a matter of fact she didn’t often read the newspaper except on Sundays. The
week-day papers only had the day’s news, and it was only occasionally that there was a
murder. But the editors of the Sunday papers had grasped that people don’t really mind
whether their murders are up to date and when there was no new murder on hand they’d
hash up an old one, sometimes going as far back as Dr Palmer and Mrs Manning. I think
Mother thought of the world outside Lower Binfleld chiefly as a place where murders
were committed. Murders had a terrible fascination for her, because, as she often said,
she just didn’t know how people could BE so wicked. Cutting their wives’ throats,
burying their fathers under cement floors, throwing babies down wells! How anyone
could DO such things! The Jack the Ripper scare had happened about the time when
Father and Mother were married, and the big wooden shutters we used to draw over the
shop windows every night dated from then. Shutters for shop windows were going out,
most of the shops in the High Street didn’t have them, but Mother felt safe behind them.
All along, she said, she’d had a dreadful feeling that Jack the Ripper was hiding in Lower
Binfield. The Crippen case — but that was years later, when I was almost grown up —
upset her badly. I can hear her voice now. ‘Gutting his poor wife up and burying her in
the coal cellar! The IDEA! What I’d do to that man if I got hold of him! ’ And curiously
enough, when she thought of the dreadful wickedness of that little American doctor who
dismembered his wife (and made a very neat job of it by taking all the bones out and
chucking the head into the sea, if I remember rightly) the tears actually came into her
eyes.
But what she mostly read on week-days was Hilda’s Home Companion. In those days it
was part of the regular furnishing of any home like ours, and as a matter of fact it still
exists, though it’s been a bit crowded out by the more streamlined women’s papers that
have come up since the war. I had a look at a copy only the other day. It’s changed, but
less than most things. There are still the same enormous serial stories that go on for six
months (and it all comes right in the end with orange blossoms to follow), and the same
Household Hints, and the same ads for sewing-machines and remedies for bad legs. It’s
chiefly the print and the illustrations that have changed. In those days the heroine had to
look like an egg-timer and now she has to look like a cylinder. Mother was a slow reader
and believed in getting her threepennyworth out of Hilda’s Home Companion. Sitting in
the old yellow armchair beside the hearth, with her feet on the iron fender and the little
pot of strong tea stewing on the hob, she’d work her way steadily from cover to cover,
right through the serial, the two short stories, the Household Hints, the ads for Zam-Buk,
and the answers to correspondents. Hilda’s Home Companion generally lasted her the
week out, and some weeks she didn’t even finish it. Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the
buzzing of the bluebottles on summer afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at
about a quarter to six she’d wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the
mantelpiece, and then get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never
late.
In those days — till 1909, to be exact — Father could still afford an errand boy, and he used
to leave the shop to him and come in to tea with the backs of his hands all mealy. Then
Mother would stop cutting slices of bread for a moment and say, ‘If you’ll give us grace,
Father’, and Father, while we all bent our heads on our chests, would mumble reverently,
‘Fwat we bout to receive — Lord make us truly thankful — Amen. ’ Later on, when Joe was
a bit older, it would be ‘YOU give us grace today, Joe’, and Joe would pipe it out. Mother
never said grace: it had to be someone of the male sex.
There were always bluebottles buzzing on summer afternoons. Ours wasn’t a sanitary
house, precious few houses in Lower B infield were. I suppose the town must have
contained five hundred houses and there certainly can’t have been more than ten with
bathrooms or fifty with what we should now describe as a W. C. In summer our backyard
always smelt of dustbins. And all houses had insects in them. We had blackbeetles in the
wainscoting and crickets somewhere behind the kitchen range, besides, of course, the
meal- worms in the shop. In those days even a house-proud woman like Mother didn’t
see anything to object to in blackbeetles. They were as much a part of the kitchen as the
dresser or the rolling-pin. But there were insects and insects. The houses in the bad street
behind the brewery, where Katie Simmons lived, were overrun by bugs. Mother or any of
the shopkeepers’ wives would have died of shame if they’d had bugs in the house. In fact
it was considered proper to say that you didn’t even know a bug by sight.
The great blue flies used to come sailing into the larder and sit longingly on the wire
covers over the meat. ‘Drat the flies! ’ people used to say, but the flies were an act of God
and apart from meat-covers and fly-papers you couldn’t do much about them. I said a
little while back that the first thing I remember is the smell of sainfoin, but the smell of
dustbins is also a pretty early memory. When I think of Mother’s kitchen, with the stone
floor and the beetle-traps and the steel fender and the blackleaded range, I always seem to
hear the bluebottles buzzing and smell the dustbin, and also old Nailer, who carried a
pretty powerful smell of dog. And God knows there are worse smells and sounds. Which
would you sooner listen to, a bluebottle or a bombing plane?
3
Joe started going to Walton Grammar School two years before I did. Neither us went
there till we were nine. It meant a four-mile bike ride morning and evening, and Mother
was scared of allowing us among the traffic, which by that time included a very few
motor- cars.
For several years we went to the dame-school kept by old Mrs Howlett. Most of the
shopkeepers’ children went there, to save them from the shame and come-down of going
to the board school, though everyone knew that Mother Howlett was an old imposter and
worse than useless as a teacher. She was over seventy, she was very deaf, she could
hardly see through her spectacles, and all she owned in the way of equipment was a cane,
a blackboard, a few dog- eared grammar books, and a couple of dozen smelly slates. She
could just manage the girls, but the boys simply laughed at her and played truant as often
as they felt like it. Once there was a frightful scandal cause a boy put his hand up a girl’s
dress, a thing I didn’t understand at the time. Mother Howlett succeeded in hushing it up.
When you did something particularly bad her formula was ‘I’ll tell your father’, and on
very rare occasions she did so. But we were quite sharp enough to see that she daren’t do
it too often, and even when she let out at you with the cane she was so old and clumsy
that it was easy to dodge.
Joe was only eight when he got in with a tough gang of boys who called themselves the
Black Hand. The leader was Sid Lovegrove, the saddler’s younger son, who was about
thirteen, and there were two other shopkeepers’ sons, an errand boy from the brewery,
and two farm lads who sometimes managed to cut work and go off with the gang for a
couple of hours. The fann lads were great lumps bursting out of corduroy breeches, with
very broad accents and rather looked down on by the rest of the gang, but they were
tolerated because they knew twice as much about animals as any of the others. One of
them, nicknamed Ginger, would even catch a rabbit in his hands occasionally. If he saw
one lying in the grass he used to fling himself on it like a spread-eagle. There was a big
social distinction between the shopkeepers’ sons and the sons of labourers and farm-
hands, but the local boys didn’t usually pay much attention to it till they were about
sixteen. The gang had a secret password and an ‘ordeal’ which included cutting your
finger and eating an earthworm, and they gave themselves out to be frightful
desperadoes. Certainly they managed to make a nuisance of themselves, broke windows
chased cows, tore the knockers off doors, and stole fruit by the hundredweight.
Sometimes in winter they managed to borrow a couple of ferrets and go ratting, when the
farmers would let them. They all had catapults and squailers, and they were always
saving up to buy a saloon pistol, which in those days cost five shillings, but the savings
never amounted to more than about threepence. In summer they used to go fishing and
bird- nesting. When Joe was at Mrs Howlett’s he used to cut school at least once a week,
and even at the Grammar School he managed it about once a fortnight. There was a boy
at the Grammar School, an auctioneer’s son, who could copy any handwriting and for a
penny he’d forge a letter from your mother saying you’d been ill yesterday. Of course I
was wild to join the Black Hand, but Joe always choked me off and said they didn’t want
any blasted kids hanging round.
It was the thought of going fishing that really appealed to me. At eight years old I hadn’t
yet been fishing, except with a penny net, with which you can sometimes catch a
stickleback. Mother was always terrified of letting us go anywhere near water. She
‘forbade’ fishing, in the way in which parents in those days ‘forbade’ almost everything,
and I hadn’t yet grasped that grownups can’t see round corners. But the thought of fishing
sent me wild with excitement. Many a time I’d been past the pool at the Mill Farm and
watched the small carp basking on the surface, and sometimes under the willow tree at
the corner a great diamond- shaped carp that to my eyes looked enormous — six inches
long, I suppose — would suddenly rise to the surface, gulp down a grub, and sink again.
I’d spent hours gluing my nose against the window of Wallace’s in the High Street,
where fishing tackle and guns and bicycles were sold. I used to he awake on summer
mornings thinking of the tales Joe had told me about fishing, how you mixed bread paste,
how your float gives a bob and plunges under and you feel the rod bending and the fish
tugging at the line. Is it any use talking about it, I wonder — the sort of fairy light that fish
and fishing tackle have in a kid’s eyes? Some kids feel the same about guns and shooting,
some feel it about motor-bikes or aeroplanes or horses. It’s not a thing that you can
explain or rationalize, it’s merely magic. One morning — it was in June and I must have
been eight — I knew that Joe was going to cut school and go out fishing, and I made up
my mind to follow. In some way Joe guessed what I was thinking about, and he started
on me while we were dressing.
‘Now then, young George! Don’t you get thinking you’re coming with the gang today.
You stay back home. ’
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t think nothing about it. ’
‘Yes, you did! You thought you were coming with the gang. ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! ’
‘No, I didn’t! ’
‘Yes, you did! You stay back home. We don’t want any bloody kids along. ’
Joe had just learned the word ‘bloody’ and was always using it. Father overheard him
once and swore that he’d thrash the life out of Joe, but as usual he didn’t do so. After
breakfast Joe started off on his bike, with his satchel and his Grammar School cap, five
minutes early as he always did when he meant to cut school, and when it was time for me
to leave for Mother Howlett’s I sneaked off and hid in the lane behind the allotments. I
knew the gang were going to the pond at the Mill Farm, and I was going to follow them if
they murdered me for it. Probably they’d give me a hiding, and probably I wouldn’t get
home to dinner, and then Mother would know that I’d cut school and I’d get another
hiding, but I didn’t care. I was just desperate to go fishing with the gang. I was cunning,
too. I allowed Joe plenty of time to make a circuit round and get to the Mill Farm by
road, and then I followed down the lane and skirted round the meadows on the far side of
the hedge, so as to get almost to the pond before the gang saw me. It was a wonderful
June morning. The buttercups were up to my knees. There was a breath of wind just
stirring the tops of the elms, and the great green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and
rich like silk. And it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round me
it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild roses were still in bloom,
and bits of soft white cloud drifting overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the
dim blue masses of the woods round Upper Binfield. And I didn’t give a damn for any of
it. All I was thinking of was the green pool and the carp and the gang with their hooks
and lines and bread paste. It was as though they were in paradise and I’d got to join them.
Presently I managed to sneak up on them — four of them, Joe and Sid Lovegrove and the
errand boy and another shopkeeper’s son, Harry Bames I think his name was.
Joe turned and saw me. ‘Christ! ’ he said. ‘It’s the kid. ’ He walked up to me like a tom-cat
that’s going to start a fight. ‘Now then, you! What’d I tell you? You get back ‘ome
double quick. ’
Both Joe and I were inclined to drop our aitches if we were at all excited. I backed away
from him.
‘I’m not going back ‘ome. ’
‘Yes you are. ’
‘Clip his ear, Joe,’ said Sid. ‘We don’t want no kids along. ’
‘ARE you going back ‘ome? ’ said Joe.
‘No. ’
‘Righto, my boy! Right-HO! ’
Then he started on me. The next minute he was chasing me round, catching me one clip
after another. But I didn’t run away from the pool, I ran in circles. Presently he’d caught
me and got me down, and then he knelt on my upper anns and began screwing my ears,
which was his favourite torture and one I couldn’t stand. I was blubbing by this time, but
still I wouldn’t give in and promise to go home. I wanted to stay and go fishing with the
gang. And suddenly the others swung round in my favour and told Joe to get up off my
chest and let me stay if I wanted to. So I stayed after all.
The others had some hooks and lines and floats and a lump of bread paste in a rag, and
we all cut ourselves willow switches from the tree at the comer of the pool. The
farmhouse was only about two hundred yards away, and you had to keep out of sight
because old Brewer was very down on fishing. Not that it made any difference to him, he
only used the pool for watering his cattle, but he hated boys. The others were still jealous
of me and kept telling me to get out of the light and reminding me that I was only a kid
and knew nothing about fishing. They said that I was making such a noise I’d scare all
the fish away, though actually I was making about half as much noise as anyone else
there. Finally they wouldn’t let me sit beside them and sent me to another part of the pool
where the water was shallower and there wasn’t so much shade. They said a kid like me
was sure to keep splashing the water and frighten the fish away. It was a rotten part of the
pool, a part where no fish would ordinarily come. I knew that. I seemed to know by a
kind of instinct the places where a fish would lie. Still, I was fishing at last. I was sitting
on the grass bank with the rod in my hands, with the flies buzzing round, and the smell of
wild peppermint fit to knock you down, watching the red float on the green water, and I
was happy as a tinker although the tear- marks mixed up with dirt were still all over my
face.
Lord knows how long we sat there. The morning stretched out and out, and the sun got
higher and higher, and nobody had a bite. It was a hot still day, too clear for fishing. The
floats lay on the water with never a quiver. You could see deep down into the water as
though you were looking into a kind of dark green glass. Out in the middle of the pool
you could see the fish lying just under the surface, sunning themselves, and sometimes in
the weeds near the side a newt would come gliding upwards and rest there with his
fingers on the weeds and his nose just out of the water. But the fish weren’t biting. The
others kept shouting that they’d got a nibble, but it was always a lie. And the time
stretched out and out and it got hotter and hotter, and the flies ate you alive, and the wild
peppermint under the bank smelt like Mother Wheeler’s sweet-shop. I was getting
hungrier and hungrier, all the more because I didn’t know for certain where my dinner
was coming from. But I sat as still as a mouse and never took my eyes off the float. The
others had given me a lump of bait about the size of a marble, telling me that would have
to do for me, but for a long time I didn’t even dare to re-bait my hook, because every
time I pulled my line up they swore I was making enough noise to frighten every fish
within five miles.
I suppose we must have been there about two hours when suddenly my float gave a
quiver. I knew it was a fish. It must have been a fish that was just passing accidentally
and saw my bait. There’s no mistaking the movement your float gives when it’s a real
bite. It’s quite different from the way it moves when you twitch your line accidentally.
The next moment it gave a sharp bob and almost went under. I couldn’t hold myself in
any longer. I yelled to the others:
‘I’ve got a bite! ’
‘Rats! ’ yelled Sid Lovegrove instantly.
But the next moment there wasn’t any doubt about it. The float dived straight down, I
could still see it under the water, kind of dim red, and I felt the rod tighten in my hand.
Christ, that feeling! The line jerking and straining and a fish on the other end of it! The
others saw my rod bending, and the next moment they’d all flung their rods down and
rushed round to me. I gave a terrific haul and the fish — a great huge silvery fish — came
flying up through the air. The same moment all of us gave a yell of agony. The fish had
slipped off the hook and fallen into the wild peppennint under the bank. But he’d fallen
into shallow water where he couldn’t turn over, and for perhaps a second he lay there on
his side helpless. Joe flung himself into the water, splashing us all over, and grabbed him
in both hands. ‘I got ‘im! ’ he yelled. The next moment he’d flung the fish on to the grass
and we were all kneeling round it. How we gloated! The poor dying brute flapped up and
down and his scales glistened all the colours of the rainbow. It was a huge carp, seven
inches long at least, and must have weighed a quarter of a pound. How we shouted to see
him! But the next moment it was as though a shadow had fallen across us. We looked up,
and there was old Brewer standing over us, with his tall billycock hat — one of those hats
they used to wear that were a cross between a top hat and a bowler — and his cowhide
gaiters and a thick hazel stick in his hand.
We suddenly cowered like partridges when there’s a hawk overhead. He looked from one
to other of us. He had a wicked old mouth with no teeth in it, and since he’d shaved his
beard off his chin looked like a nutcracker.
‘What are you boys doing here? ’ he said.
There wasn’t much doubt about what we were doing. Nobody answered.
‘I’ll learn ‘ee come fishing in my pool! ’ he suddenly roared, and the next moment he was
on us, whacking out in all directions.
The Black Hand broke and fled. We left all the rods behind and also the fish. Old Brewer
chased us half across the meadow. His legs were stiff and he couldn’t move fast, but he
got in some good swipes before we were out of his reach. We left him in the middle of
the field, yelling after us that he knew all our names and was going to tell our fathers. I’d
been at the back and most of the wallops had landed on me. I had some nasty red weals
on the calves of my legs when we got to the other side of the hedge.
I spent the rest of the day with the gang. They hadn’t made up their mind whether I was
really a member yet, but for the time being they tolerated me. The errand boy, who’d had
the morning off on some lying pretext or other, had to go back to the brewery. The rest of
us went for a long, meandering, scrounging kind of walk, the sort of walk that boys go for
when they’re away from home all day, and especially when they’re away without
pennission. It was the first real boy’s walk I’d had, quite different from the walks we
used to go with Katie Simmons. We had our dinner in a dry ditch on the edge of the
town, full of rusty cans and wild fennel. The others gave me bits of their dinner, and Sid
Lovegrove had a penny, so someone fetched a Penny Monster which we had between us.
It was very hot, and the fennel smelt very strong, and the gas of the Penny Monster made
us belch. Afterwards we wandered up the dusty white road to Upper Binfield, the first
time I’d been that way, I believe, and into the beech woods with the carpets of dead
leaves and the great smooth tru nk s that soar up into the sky so that the birds in the upper
branches look like dots. You could go wherever you liked in the woods in those days.
Binfield House, was shut up, they didn’t preserve the pheasants any longer, and at the
worst you’d only meet a carter with a load of wood. There was a tree that had been sawn
down, and the rings of the trunk looked like a target, and we had shots at it with stones.
Then the others had shots at birds with their catapults, and Sid Lovegrove swore he’d hit
a chaffinch and it had stuck in a fork in the tree. Joe said he was lying, and they argued
and almost fought. Then we went down into a chalk hollow full of beds of dead leaves
and shouted to hear the echo. Someone shouted a dirty word, and then we said over all
the dirty words we knew, and the others jeered at me because I only knew three. Sid
Lovegrove said he knew how babies were bom and it was just the same as rabbits except
that the baby came out of the woman’s navel. Harry Barnes started to carve the word —
— on a beech tree, but got fed up with it after the first two letters.
