After dinner the
sergeant
came round the barn where we were billeted looking for men
for a fatigue.
for a fatigue.
Orwell - Coming Up for Air
All
the fences were green and rotting, the park was a mass of nettles, the plantations were
like a jungle, and even the gardens had gone back to meadow, with only a few old
gnarled rose- bushes to show you where the beds had been. But it was a very beautiful
house, especially from a distance. It was a great white place with colonnades and long-
shaped windows, which had been built, I suppose, about Queen Anne’s time by someone
who’d travelled in Italy. If I went there now I’d probably get a certain kick out of
wandering round the general desolation and thinking about the life that used to go on
there, and the people who built such places because they imagined that the good days
would last for ever. As a boy I didn’t give either the house or the grounds a second look. I
dug out old Hodges, who’d just finished his dinner and was a bit surly, and got him to
show me the way down to the pool. It was several hundred yards behind the house and
completely hidden in the beech woods, but it was a good-sized pool, almost a lake, about
a hundred and fifty yards across. It was astonishing, and even at that age it astonished me,
that there, a dozen miles from Reading and not fifty from London, you could have such
solitude. You felt as much alone as if you’d been on the ha nk s of the Amazon. The pool
was ringed completely round by the enormous beech trees, which in one place came
down to the edge and were reflected in the water. On the other side there was a patch of
grass where there was a hollow with beds of wild peppermint, and up at one end of the
pool an old wooden boathouse was rotting among the bulrushes.
The pool was swarming with bream, small ones, about four to six inches long. Every now
and again you’d see one of them turn half over and gleam reddy brown under the water.
There were pike there too, and they must have been big ones. You never saw them, but
sometimes one that was basking among the weeds would turn over and plunge with a
splash that was like a brick being bunged into the water. It was no use trying to catch
them, though of course I always tried every time I went there. I tried them with dace and
minnows I’d caught in the Thames and kept alive in a jam-jar, and even with a spinner
made out of a bit of tin. But they were gorged with fish and wouldn’t bite, and in any
case they’d have broken any tackle I possessed. I never came back from the pool without
at least a dozen small bream. Sometimes in the summer holidays I went there for a whole
day, with my fishing-rod and a copy of Chums or the Union Jack or something, and a
hu nk of bread and cheese which Mother had wrapped up for me. And I’ve fished for
hours and then lain in the grass hollow and read the Union Jack, and then the smell of my
bread paste and the plop of a fish jumping somewhere would send me wild again, and I’d
go back to the water and have another go, and so on all through a summer’s day. And the
best of all was to be alone, utterly alone, though the road wasn’t a quarter of a mile away.
I was just old enough to know that it’s good to be alone occasionally. With the trees all
round you it was as though the pool belonged to you, and nothing ever stirred except the
fish ringing the water and the pigeons passing overhead. And yet, in the two years or so
that I went fishing there, how many times did I really go, I wonder? Not more than a
dozen. It was a three-mile bike ride from home and took up a whole afternoon at least.
And sometimes other things turned up, and sometimes when I’d meant to go it rained.
You know the way things happen.
One afternoon the fish weren’t biting and I began to explore at the end of the pool
farthest from Binfield House. There was a bit of an overflow of water and the ground was
boggy, and you had to fight your way through a sort of jungle of blackberry bushes and
rotten boughs that had fallen off the trees. I struggled through it for about fifty yards, and
then suddenly there was a clearing and I came to another pool which I had never known
existed. It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of
the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. I could see
ten or fifteen feet down into it. I hung about for a bit, enjoying the dampness and the
rotten boggy smell, the way a boy does. And then I saw something that almost made me
jump out of my skin.
It was an enonnous fish. I don’t exaggerate when I say it was enormous. It was almost
the length of my ann. It glided across the pool, deep under water, and then became a
shadow and disappeared into the darker water on the other side. I felt as if a sword had
gone through me. It was far the biggest fish I’d ever seen, dead or alive. I stood there
without breathing, and in a moment another huge thick shape glided through the water,
and then another and then two more close together. The pool was full of them. They were
carp, I suppose. Just possibly they were bream or tench, but more probably carp. Bream
or tench wouldn’t grow so huge. I knew what had happened. At some time this pool had
been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had
closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten. It’s a thing that happens
occasionally. A pool gets forgotten somehow, nobody fishes in it for years and decades
and the fish grow to monstrous sizes. The brutes that I was watching might be a hundred
years old. And not a soul in the world knew about them except me. Very likely it was
twenty years since anyone had so much as looked at the pool, and probably even old
Hodges and Mr Farrel’s bailiff had forgotten its existence.
Well, you can imagine what I felt. After a bit I couldn’t even bear the tantalization of
watching. I hurried back to the other pool and got my fishing things together. It was no
use trying for those colossal brutes with the tackle I had. They’d snap it as if it had been a
hair. And I couldn’t go on fishing any longer for the tiny bream. The sight of the big carp
had given me a feeling in my stomach almost as if I was going to be sick. I got on to my
bike and whizzed down the hill and home. It was a wonderful secret for a boy to have.
There was the dark pool hidden away in the woods and the monstrous fish sailing round
it — fish that had never been fished for and would grab the first bait you offered them. It
was only a question of getting hold of a line strong enough to hold them. Already I’d
made all the arrangements. I’d buy the tackle that would hold them if I had to steal the
money out of the till. Somehow, God knew how, I’d get hold of half a crown and buy a
length of silk salmon line and some thick gut or gimp and Number 5 hooks, and come
back with cheese and gentles and paste and mealworms and brandlings and grasshoppers
and every mortal bait a carp might look at. The very next Saturday afternoon I’d come
back and try for them.
But as it happened I never went back. One never does go back. I never stole the money
out of the till or bought the bit of salmon line or had a try for those carp. Almost
immediately afterwards something turned up to prevent me, but if it hadn’t been that it
would have been something else. It’s the way things happen.
I know, of course, that you think I’m exaggerating about the size of those fish. You think,
probably, that they were just medium- sized fish (a foot long, say) and that they’ve
swollen gradually in my memory. But it isn’t so. People tell lies about the fish they’ve
caught and still more about the fish that are hooked and get away, but I never caught any
of these or even tried to catch them, and I’ve no motive for lying. I tell you they were
enonnous.
5
Fishing!
Here I’ll make a confession, or rather two. The first is that when I look back through my
life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as
fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women. I don’t set
up to be one of those men that don’t care about women. I’ve spent plenty of time chasing
them, and I would even now if I had the chance. Still, if you gave me the choice of
having any woman you care to name, but I mean ANY woman, or catching a ten-pound
carp, the carp would win every time. And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I
never fished again.
Why? Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead — I don’t mean
human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country — we
don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-
hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives
us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’s time for everything except the things worth
doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the
fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time
you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway,
junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.
After I was sixteen I didn’t go fishing again. There never seemed to be time. I was at
work, I was chasing girls, I was wearing my first button boots and my first high collars
(and for the collars of 1909 you needed a neck like a giraffe), I was doing correspondence
courses in salesmanship and accountancy and ‘improving my mind’. The great fish were
gliding round in the pool behind Binfield House. Nobody knew about them except me.
They were stored away in my mind; some day, some bank holiday perhaps, I’d go back
and catch them. But I never went back. There was time for everything except that.
Curiously enough, the only time between then and now when I did very nearly go fishing
was during the war.
It was in the autumn of 1916, just before I was wounded. We’d come out of trenches to a
village behind the line, and though it was only September we were covered with mud
from head to foot. As usual we didn’t kn ow for certain how long we were going to stay
there or where we were going afterwards. Luckily the C. O. was a bit off-colour, a touch
of bronchitis or something, and so didn’t bother about driving us through the usual
parades, kit-inspections, football matches, and so forth which were supposed to keep up
the spirits of the troops when they were out of the line. We spent the first day sprawling
about on piles of chaff in the barns where we were billeted and scraping the mud off our
putties, and in the evening some of the chaps started queueing up for a couple of
wretched wom-out whores who were established in a house at the end of the village. In
the morning, although it was against orders to leave the village, I managed to sneak off
and wander round the ghastly desolation that had once been fields. It was a damp, wintry
kind of morning. All round, of course, were the awful muck and litter of war, the sort of
filthy sordid mess that’s actually worse than a battlefield of corpses. Trees with boughs
torn off them, old shell-holes that had partly filled up again, tin cans, turds, mud, weeds,
clumps of rusty barbed wire with weeds growing through them. You know the feeling
you had when you came out of the line. A stiffened feeling in all your joints, and inside
you a kind of emptiness, a feeling that you’d never again have any interest in anything. It
was partly fear and exhaustion but mainly boredom. At that time no one saw any reason
why the war shouldn’t go on for ever. Today or tomorrow or the day after you were going
back to the line, and maybe next week a shell would blow you to potted meat, but that
wasn’t so bad as the ghastly boredom of the war stretching out for ever.
I was wandering up the side of a hedge when I ran into a chap in our company whose
surname I don’t remember but who was nicknamed Nobby. He was a dark, slouching,
gypsy-looking chap, a chap who even in unifonn always gave the impression that he was
carrying a couple of stolen rabbits. By trade he was a coster and he was a real Cockney,
but one of those Cockneys that make part of their living by hop-picking, bird-catching,
poaching, and fruit-stealing in Kent and Essex. He was a great expert on dogs, ferrets,
cage- birds, fighting-cocks, and that kind of thing. As soon as he saw me he beckoned to
me with his head. He had a sly, vicious way of talking:
“Ere, George! ’ (The chaps still called me George — I hadn’t got fat in those days. )
‘George! Ja see that clump of poplars acrost the field? ’
‘Yes. ’
‘Well, there’s a pool on t’other side of it, and it’s full of bleeding great fish. ’
‘Fish? Gam! ’
‘I tell you it’s bleeding full of ‘em. Perch, they are. As good fish as ever I got my thumbs
on. Com’n see f yerself, then. ’
We trudged over the mud together. Sure enough, Nobby was right. On the other side of
the poplars there was a dirty-looking pool with sandy banks. Obviously it had been a
quarry and had got filled up with water. And it was swanning with perch. You could see
their dark blue stripy backs gliding everywhere just under water, and some of them must
have weighed a pound. I suppose in two years of war they hadn’t been disturbed and had
had time to multiply. Probably you can’t imagine what the sight of those perch had done
to me. It was as though they’d suddenly brought me to life. Of course there was only one
thought in both our minds — how to get hold of a rod and line.
‘Christ! ’ I said. ‘We’ll have some of those. ’
‘You bet we f — well will. C’mon back to the village and let’s get ‘old of some tackle. ’
‘O. K. You want to watch out, though. If the sergeant gets to know we’ll cop it. ’
‘Oh, f — the sergeant. They can ‘ang, drore, and quarter me if they want to. I’m going to
‘ave some of them bleeding fish. ’
You can’t know how wild we were to catch those fish. Or perhaps you can, if you’ve ever
been at war. You know the frantic boredom of war and the way you’ll clutch at almost
any kind of amusement. I’ve seen two chaps in a dugout fight like devils over half a
threepenny magazine. But there was more to it than that. It was the thought of escaping,
for perhaps a whole day, right out of the atmosphere of war. To be sitting under the
poplar trees, fishing for perch, away from the Company, away from the noise and the
stink and the uniforms and the officers and the saluting and the sergeant’s voice! Fishing
is the opposite of war. But it wasn’t at all certain that we could bring it off. That was the
thought that sent us into a kind of fever. If the sergeant found out he’d stop us as sure as
fate, and so would any of the officers, and the worst of all was that there was no knowing
how long we were going to stay at the village. We might stay there a week, we might
march off in two hours. Meanwhile we’d no fishing tackle of any kind, not even a pin or
a bit of string. We had to start from scratch. And the pool was swarming with fish! The
first thing was a rod. A willow wand is best, but of course there wasn’t a willow tree
anywhere this side of the horizon. Nobby shinned up one of the poplars and cut off a
small bough which wasn’t actually good but was better than nothing. He trimmed it down
with his jack-knife till it looked something like a fishing-rod, and then we hid it in the
weeds near the bank and managed to sneak back into the village without being seen.
The next thing was a needle to make a hook. Nobody had a needle. One chap had some
darning needles, but they were too thick and had blunt ends. We daren’t let anyone know
what we wanted it for, for fear the sergeant should hear about it. At last we thought of the
whores at the end of the village. They were pretty sure to have a needle. When we got
there — you had to go round to the back door through a mucky courtyard — the house was
shut up and the whores were having a sleep which they’d no doubt earned. We stamped
and yelled and banged on the door until after about ten minutes a fat ugly woman in a
wrapper came down and screamed at us in French. Nobby shouted at her:
‘Needle! Needle! You got a needle! ’
Of course she didn’t know what he was talking about. Then Nobby tried pidgin English,
which he expected her as a foreigner to understand:
‘Wantee needle! Sewee clothee! Likee thisee! ’
He made gestures which were supposed to represent sewing. The whore misunderstood
him and opened the door a bit wider to let us in. Finally we made her understand and got
a needle from her. By this time it was dinner time.
After dinner the sergeant came round the barn where we were billeted looking for men
for a fatigue. We managed to dodge him just in time by getting under a pile of chaff.
When he was gone we got a candle alight, made the needle red-hot, and managed to bend
it into a kind of hook. We didn’t have any tools except jack- knives, and we burned our
fingers badly. The next thing was a line. Nobody had any string except thick stuff, but at
last we came across a fellow who had a reel of sewing thread. He didn’t want to part with
it and we had to give him a whole packet of fags for it. The thread was much too thin, but
Nobby cut it into three lengths, tied them to a nail in the wall, and carefully plaited them.
Meanwhile after searching all over the village I’d managed to find a cork, and I cut it in
half and stuck a match through it to make afloat. By this time it was evening and getting
on towards dark.
We’d got the essentials now, but we could do with some gut. There didn’t seem much
hope of getting any until we thought of the hospital orderly. Surgical gut wasn’t part of
his equipment, but it was just possible that he might have some. Sure enough, when we
asked him, we found he’d a whole hank of medical gut in his haversack. It had taken his
fancy in some hospital or other and he’d pinched it. We swapped another packet of fags
for ten lengths of gut. It was rotten brittle stuff, in pieces about six inches long. After dark
Nobby soaked them till they were pliable and tied them end to end. So now we’d got
everything — hook, rod, line, float, and gut. We could dig up worms anywhere. And the
pool was swarming with fish! Huge great stripy perch crying out to be caught! We lay
down to kip in such a fever that we didn’t even take our boots off. Tomorrow! If we
could just have tomorrow! If the war would forget about us for just a day! We made up
our minds that as soon as roll-call was over we’d hook it and stay away all day, even if
they gave us Field Punishment No. 1 for it when we came back.
Well, I expect you can guess the rest. At roll-call orders were to pack all kits and be ready
to march in twenty minutes. We marched nine miles down the road and then got on to
lorries and were off to another part of the line. As for the pool under the poplar trees, I
never saw or heard of it again. I expect it got poisoned with mustard gas later on.
Since then I’ve never fished. I never seemed to get the chance. There was the rest of the
war, and then like everyone else I was fighting for a job, and then I’d got a job and the
job had got me. I was a promising young fellow in an insurance office — one of those
keen young businessmen with firm jaws and good prospects that you used to read about
in the Clark’s College adverts — and then I was the usual down-trodden five-to-ten-
pounds-a-weeker in a semidetached villa in the inner-outer suburbs. Such people don’t go
fishing, any more than stockbrokers go out picking primroses. It wouldn’t be suitable.
Other recreations are provided for them.
Of course I have my fortnight’s holiday every summer. You know the kind of holiday.
Margate, Yarmouth, Eastbourne, Hastings, Bournemouth, Brighton. There’s a slight
variation according to whether or not we’re flush that year. With a woman like Hilda
along, the chief feature of a holiday is endless mental arithmetic to decide how much the
boarding-house keeper is swindling you. That and telling the kids, No, they can’t have a
new sandbucket. A few years back we were at Bournemouth. One fine afternoon we
loitered down the pier, which must be about half a mile long, and all the way along it
chaps were fishing with stumpy sea-rods with little bells on the end and their lines
stretching fifty yards out to sea. It’s a dull kind of fishing, and they weren’t catching
anything. Still, they were fishing. The kids soon got bored and clamoured to go back to
the beach, and Hilda saw a chap sticking a lobworm on his hook and said it made her feel
sick, but I kept loitering up and down for a little while longer. And suddenly there was a
tremendous ringing from a bell and a chap was winding in his line. Everyone stopped to
watch. And sure enough, in it came, the wet line and the lump of lead and on the end a
great flat-fish (a flounder, I think) dangling and wriggling. The chap dumped it on to the
planks of the pier, and it flapped up and down, all wet and gleaming, with its grey warty
back and its white belly and the fresh salty smell of the sea. And something kind of
moved inside me.
As we moved off I said casually, just to test Hilda’s reaction:
‘I’ve half a mind to do a bit of fishing myself while we’re here. ’
‘What! YOU go fishing, George? But you don’t even know how, do you? ’
‘Oh, I used to be a great fisherman,’ I told her.
She was vaguely against it, as usual, but didn’t have many ideas one way or the other,
except that if I went fishing she wasn’t coming with me to watch me put those nasty
squashy things on the hook. Then suddenly she got on to the fact that if I was to go
fishing the set-out-that I’d need, rod and reel and so forth, would cost round about a quid.
The rod alone would cost ten bob. Instantly she flew into a temper. You haven’t seen old
Hilda when there’s talk of wasting ten bob. She burst out at me:
‘The IDEA of wasting all that money on a thing like that! Absurd! And how they DARE
charge ten shillings for one of those silly little fishing-rods! It’s disgraceful. And fancy
you going fishing at your age! A great big grown-up man like you. Don’t be such a
BABY, George. ’
Then the kids got on to it. Loma sidled up to me and asked in that silly pert way she has,
‘Are you a baby, Daddy? ’ and little Billy, who at that time didn’t speak quite plain,
announced to the world in general, ‘Farver’s a baby. ’ Then suddenly they were both
dancing round me, rattling their sandbuckets and chanting:
‘Farver’s a baby! Farver’s a baby! ’
Unnatural little bastards!
6
And besides fishing there was reading.
I’ve exaggerated if I’ve given the impression that fishing was the ONLY thing I cared
about. Fishing certainly came first, but reading was a good second. I must have been
either ten or eleven when I started reading — reading voluntarily, I mean. At that age it’s
like discovering a new world. I’m a considerable reader even now, in fact there aren’t
many weeks in which I don’t get through a couple of novels. I’m what you might call the
typical Boots Library subscriber, I always fall for the best-seller of the moment (The
Good Companions, Bengal Lancer, Hatter’s Castle — I fell for every one of them), and
I’ve been a member of the Left Book Club for a year or more. And in 1918, when I was
twenty-five, I had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to my
outlook. But nothing is ever like those first years when you suddenly discover that you
can open a penny weekly paper and plunge straight into thieves’ kitchens and Chinese
opium dens and Polynesian islands and the forests of Brazil.
It was from when I was eleven to when I was about sixteen that I got my biggest kick out
of reading. At first it was always the boys’ penny weeklies — little thin papers with vile
print and an illustration in three colours on the cover — and a bit later it was books.
Sherlock Holmes, Dr Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles. And Nat Gould and
Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly
as Nat Gould wrote racing ones. I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated
I’d have had ‘good’ books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth,
and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel
sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle. But there were practically no
books in our house. Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and
Smiles’s Self Help, and I didn’t of my own accord read a ‘good’ book till much later. I’m
not sorry it happened that way. I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of
them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.
The old penny dreadfuls were already going out when I was a kid, and I can barely
remember them, but there was a regular line of boys’ weeklies, some of which still exist.
The Buffalo Bill stories have gone out, I think, and Nat Gould probably isn’t read any
longer, but Nick Carter and Sexton Blake seem to be still the same as ever. The Gem and
the Magnet, if I’m remembering rightly, started about 1905. The B. O. P. was still rather pi
in those days, but Chums, which I think must have started about 1903, was splendid.
Then there was an encyclopedia — I don’t remember its exact name — which was issued in
penny numbers. It never seemed quite worth buying, but a boy at school used to give
away back numbers sometimes. If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the
difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal,
that’s where I learned it from.
Joe never read. He was one of those boys who can go through years of schooling and at
the end of it are unable to read ten lines consecutively. The sight of print made him feel
sick. I’ve seen him pick up one of my numbers of Chums, read a paragraph or two and
then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale
hay. He tried to kick me out of reading, but Mother and Father, who had decided that I
was ‘the clever one’, backed me up. They were rather proud that I showed a taste for
‘book-learning’, as they called it. But it was typical of both of them that they were
vaguely upset by my reading things like Chums and the Union Jack, thought that I ought
to read something ‘improving’ but didn’t know enough about books to be sure which
books were ‘improving’. Finally Mother got hold of a second-hand copy of Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs, which I didn’t read, though the illustrations weren’t half bad.
All through the winter of 1905 I spent a penny on Chums every week. I was following up
their serial story, ‘Donovan the Dauntless’. Donovan the Dauntless was an explorer who
was employed by an American millionaire to fetch incredible things from various comers
of the earth. Sometimes it was diamonds the size of golf balls from the craters of
volcanoes in Africa, sometimes it was petrified mammoths’ tusks from the frozen forests
of Siberia, sometimes it was buried Inca treasures from the lost cities of Peru. Donovan
went on a new journey every week, and he always made good. My favourite place for
reading was the loft behind the yard. Except when Father was getting out fresh sacks of
grain it was the quietest place in the house. There were huge piles of sacks to lie on, and a
sort of plastery smell mixed up with the smell of sainfoin, and bunches of cobwebs in all
the corners, and just over the place where I used to lie there was a hole in the ceiling and
a lath sticking out of the plaster. I can feel the feeling of it now. A winter day, just warm
enough to lie still. I’m lying on my belly with Chums open in front of me. A mouse runs
up the side of a sack like a clockwork toy, then suddenly stops dead and watches me with
his little eyes like tiny jet beads. I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless.
Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent, and the roots of the
mysterious orchid that blooms once in a hundred years are safe in the tin box under my
camp bed. In the forests all round Hopi-Hopi Indians, who paint their teeth scarlet and
skin white men alive, are beating their war-drums. I’m watching the mouse and the
mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell,
and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.
7
That’s all, really.
I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of
when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster, and the chances are that I’ve told you
nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you
don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you. So far I’ve only spoken about the things that
happened to me before I was sixteen. Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the
family. It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what
people call ‘real life’, meaning unpleasantness.
About three days after I’d seen the big carp at Binficld House, Father came in to tea
looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual. He ate his way solemnly
through his tea and didn’t talk much. In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of
eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because
he hadn’t many back teeth left. I was just getting up from table when he called me back.
‘Wait a minute, George, my boy. I got suthing to say to you. Sit down jest a minute.
Mother, you heard what I got to say last night. ’
Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn.
Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal
with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:
‘George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you. I been thinking it over, and it’s about time
you left school. ‘Fraid you’ll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring
home to your mother. I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to
take you away. ’
Of course this was quite according to precedent — his writing to Mr Wicksey before
telling me, I mean. Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged
everything over their children’s heads.
Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations. He’d ‘had bad
times lately’, things had ‘been a bit difficult’, and the upshot was that Joe and I would
have to start earning our living. At that time I didn’t either know or greatly care whether
the business was really in a bad way or not. I hadn’t even enough commercial instinct to
see the reason why things were ‘difficult’. The fact was that Father had been hit by
competition. Sarazins’, the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home
counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield. Six months earlier they’d taken the
lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt
lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas,
it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards’ distance. Sarazins’, besides selling flower seeds,
described themselves as ‘universal poultry and livestock providers’, and apart from wheat
and oats and so forth they went in for patent poultry mixtures, bird-seed done up in fancy
packets, dog-biscuits of all shapes and colours, medicines, embrocations, and
conditioning powders, and branched off into such things as rat- traps, dog-chains,
incubators, sanitary eggs, bird-nesting, bulbs, weed-killer, insecticide, and even, in some
branches, into what they called a ‘livestock department’, meaning rabbits and day-old
chicks. Father, with his dusty old shop and his refusal to stock new lines, couldn’t
compete with that kind of thing and didn’t want to. The tradesmen with their van-horses,
and such of the farmers as dealt with the retail seedsmen, fought shy of Sarazins’, but in
six months they’d gathered in the petty gentry of the neighbourhood, who in those days
had carriages or dogcarts and therefore horses. This meant a big loss of trade for Father
and the other corn merchant, Winkle. I didn’t grasp any of this at the time. I had a boy’s
attitude towards it all. I’d never taken any interest in the business. I’d never or hardly
ever served in the shop, and when, as occasionally happened, Father wanted me to run an
errand or give a hand with something, such as hoisting sacks of grain up to the loft or
down again, I’d always dodged it whenever possible. Boys in our class aren’t such
complete babies as public schoolboys, they know that work is work and sixpence is
sixpence, but it seems natural for a boy to regard his father’s business as a bore. Up till
that time fishing-rods, bicycles, fizzy lemonade, and so forth had seemed to me a good
deal more real than anything that happened in the grown-up world.
Father had already spoken to old Grimmett, the grocer, who wanted a smart lad and was
willing to take me into the shop immediately. Meanwhile Father was going to get rid of
the errand boy, and Joe was to come home and help with the shop till he got a regular job.
Joe had left school some time back and had been more or less loafing ever since. Father
had sometimes talked of ‘getting him into’ the accounts department at the brewery, and
earlier had even had thoughts of making him into an auctioneer. Both were completely
hopeless because Joe, at seventeen, wrote a hand like a ploughboy and couldn’t repeat the
multiplication table. At present he was supposed to be ‘learning the trade’ at a big bicycle
shop on the outskirts of Walton. Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most half-
wits, had a slight mechanical turn, but he was quite incapable of working steadily and
spent all his time loafing about in greasy overalls, smoking Woodbines, getting into
fights, drinking (he’s started that already), getting ‘talked of with one girl after another,
and sticking Father for money. Father was worried, puzzled, and vaguely resentful. I can
see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his
spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty
pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t
understand it. He’d inherited the business from his father, he’d done an honest trade,
worked hard, sold sound goods, swindled nobody — and his profits were going down. He
said a number of times, between sucking at his teeth to get the crumb out, that times were
very bad, trade seemed very slack, he couldn’t think what had come over people, it
wasn’t as if the horses didn’t have to eat. Perhaps it was these here motors, he decided
finally. ‘Nasty smelly things! ’ Mother put in. She was a little worried, and knew that she
ought to be more so. Once or twice while Father was talking there was a far-away look in
her eyes and I could see her lips moving. She was trying to decide whether it should be a
round of beef and carrots tomorrow or another leg of mutton. Except when there was
something in her own line that needed foresight, such as buying linen or saucepans, she
wasn’t really capable of thinking beyond tomorrow’s meals. The shop was giving trouble
and Father was worried — that was about as far as she saw into it. None of us had any
grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and lost money, but was he
really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t
know what was happening to him, he wasn’t capable of foreseeing that these Sarazin
people would systematically under-sell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he?
Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man. All he knew was that times
were bad, trade was very ‘slack’, very ‘slow’ (he kept repeating these phrases), but
probably things would Took up presently’.
It would be nice if I could tell you that I was a great help to my father in his time of
trouble, suddenly proved myself a man, and developed qualities which no one had
suspected in me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you used to read in the uplift
novels of thirty years ago. Or alternatively I’d like to be able to record that I bitterly
resented having to leave school, my eager young mind, yearning for knowledge and
refinement, recoiled from the soulless mechanical job into which they were thrusting
me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you read in the uplift novels today.
the fences were green and rotting, the park was a mass of nettles, the plantations were
like a jungle, and even the gardens had gone back to meadow, with only a few old
gnarled rose- bushes to show you where the beds had been. But it was a very beautiful
house, especially from a distance. It was a great white place with colonnades and long-
shaped windows, which had been built, I suppose, about Queen Anne’s time by someone
who’d travelled in Italy. If I went there now I’d probably get a certain kick out of
wandering round the general desolation and thinking about the life that used to go on
there, and the people who built such places because they imagined that the good days
would last for ever. As a boy I didn’t give either the house or the grounds a second look. I
dug out old Hodges, who’d just finished his dinner and was a bit surly, and got him to
show me the way down to the pool. It was several hundred yards behind the house and
completely hidden in the beech woods, but it was a good-sized pool, almost a lake, about
a hundred and fifty yards across. It was astonishing, and even at that age it astonished me,
that there, a dozen miles from Reading and not fifty from London, you could have such
solitude. You felt as much alone as if you’d been on the ha nk s of the Amazon. The pool
was ringed completely round by the enormous beech trees, which in one place came
down to the edge and were reflected in the water. On the other side there was a patch of
grass where there was a hollow with beds of wild peppermint, and up at one end of the
pool an old wooden boathouse was rotting among the bulrushes.
The pool was swarming with bream, small ones, about four to six inches long. Every now
and again you’d see one of them turn half over and gleam reddy brown under the water.
There were pike there too, and they must have been big ones. You never saw them, but
sometimes one that was basking among the weeds would turn over and plunge with a
splash that was like a brick being bunged into the water. It was no use trying to catch
them, though of course I always tried every time I went there. I tried them with dace and
minnows I’d caught in the Thames and kept alive in a jam-jar, and even with a spinner
made out of a bit of tin. But they were gorged with fish and wouldn’t bite, and in any
case they’d have broken any tackle I possessed. I never came back from the pool without
at least a dozen small bream. Sometimes in the summer holidays I went there for a whole
day, with my fishing-rod and a copy of Chums or the Union Jack or something, and a
hu nk of bread and cheese which Mother had wrapped up for me. And I’ve fished for
hours and then lain in the grass hollow and read the Union Jack, and then the smell of my
bread paste and the plop of a fish jumping somewhere would send me wild again, and I’d
go back to the water and have another go, and so on all through a summer’s day. And the
best of all was to be alone, utterly alone, though the road wasn’t a quarter of a mile away.
I was just old enough to know that it’s good to be alone occasionally. With the trees all
round you it was as though the pool belonged to you, and nothing ever stirred except the
fish ringing the water and the pigeons passing overhead. And yet, in the two years or so
that I went fishing there, how many times did I really go, I wonder? Not more than a
dozen. It was a three-mile bike ride from home and took up a whole afternoon at least.
And sometimes other things turned up, and sometimes when I’d meant to go it rained.
You know the way things happen.
One afternoon the fish weren’t biting and I began to explore at the end of the pool
farthest from Binfield House. There was a bit of an overflow of water and the ground was
boggy, and you had to fight your way through a sort of jungle of blackberry bushes and
rotten boughs that had fallen off the trees. I struggled through it for about fifty yards, and
then suddenly there was a clearing and I came to another pool which I had never known
existed. It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of
the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. I could see
ten or fifteen feet down into it. I hung about for a bit, enjoying the dampness and the
rotten boggy smell, the way a boy does. And then I saw something that almost made me
jump out of my skin.
It was an enonnous fish. I don’t exaggerate when I say it was enormous. It was almost
the length of my ann. It glided across the pool, deep under water, and then became a
shadow and disappeared into the darker water on the other side. I felt as if a sword had
gone through me. It was far the biggest fish I’d ever seen, dead or alive. I stood there
without breathing, and in a moment another huge thick shape glided through the water,
and then another and then two more close together. The pool was full of them. They were
carp, I suppose. Just possibly they were bream or tench, but more probably carp. Bream
or tench wouldn’t grow so huge. I knew what had happened. At some time this pool had
been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had
closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten. It’s a thing that happens
occasionally. A pool gets forgotten somehow, nobody fishes in it for years and decades
and the fish grow to monstrous sizes. The brutes that I was watching might be a hundred
years old. And not a soul in the world knew about them except me. Very likely it was
twenty years since anyone had so much as looked at the pool, and probably even old
Hodges and Mr Farrel’s bailiff had forgotten its existence.
Well, you can imagine what I felt. After a bit I couldn’t even bear the tantalization of
watching. I hurried back to the other pool and got my fishing things together. It was no
use trying for those colossal brutes with the tackle I had. They’d snap it as if it had been a
hair. And I couldn’t go on fishing any longer for the tiny bream. The sight of the big carp
had given me a feeling in my stomach almost as if I was going to be sick. I got on to my
bike and whizzed down the hill and home. It was a wonderful secret for a boy to have.
There was the dark pool hidden away in the woods and the monstrous fish sailing round
it — fish that had never been fished for and would grab the first bait you offered them. It
was only a question of getting hold of a line strong enough to hold them. Already I’d
made all the arrangements. I’d buy the tackle that would hold them if I had to steal the
money out of the till. Somehow, God knew how, I’d get hold of half a crown and buy a
length of silk salmon line and some thick gut or gimp and Number 5 hooks, and come
back with cheese and gentles and paste and mealworms and brandlings and grasshoppers
and every mortal bait a carp might look at. The very next Saturday afternoon I’d come
back and try for them.
But as it happened I never went back. One never does go back. I never stole the money
out of the till or bought the bit of salmon line or had a try for those carp. Almost
immediately afterwards something turned up to prevent me, but if it hadn’t been that it
would have been something else. It’s the way things happen.
I know, of course, that you think I’m exaggerating about the size of those fish. You think,
probably, that they were just medium- sized fish (a foot long, say) and that they’ve
swollen gradually in my memory. But it isn’t so. People tell lies about the fish they’ve
caught and still more about the fish that are hooked and get away, but I never caught any
of these or even tried to catch them, and I’ve no motive for lying. I tell you they were
enonnous.
5
Fishing!
Here I’ll make a confession, or rather two. The first is that when I look back through my
life I can’t honestly say that anything I’ve ever done has given me quite such a kick as
fishing. Everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women. I don’t set
up to be one of those men that don’t care about women. I’ve spent plenty of time chasing
them, and I would even now if I had the chance. Still, if you gave me the choice of
having any woman you care to name, but I mean ANY woman, or catching a ten-pound
carp, the carp would win every time. And the other confession is that after I was sixteen I
never fished again.
Why? Because that’s how things happen. Because in this life we lead — I don’t mean
human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country — we
don’t do the things we want to do. It isn’t because we’re always working. Even a farm-
hand or a Jew tailor isn’t always working. It’s because there’s some devil in us that drives
us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There’s time for everything except the things worth
doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the
fraction of your life that you’ve actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time
you’ve spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway,
junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.
After I was sixteen I didn’t go fishing again. There never seemed to be time. I was at
work, I was chasing girls, I was wearing my first button boots and my first high collars
(and for the collars of 1909 you needed a neck like a giraffe), I was doing correspondence
courses in salesmanship and accountancy and ‘improving my mind’. The great fish were
gliding round in the pool behind Binfield House. Nobody knew about them except me.
They were stored away in my mind; some day, some bank holiday perhaps, I’d go back
and catch them. But I never went back. There was time for everything except that.
Curiously enough, the only time between then and now when I did very nearly go fishing
was during the war.
It was in the autumn of 1916, just before I was wounded. We’d come out of trenches to a
village behind the line, and though it was only September we were covered with mud
from head to foot. As usual we didn’t kn ow for certain how long we were going to stay
there or where we were going afterwards. Luckily the C. O. was a bit off-colour, a touch
of bronchitis or something, and so didn’t bother about driving us through the usual
parades, kit-inspections, football matches, and so forth which were supposed to keep up
the spirits of the troops when they were out of the line. We spent the first day sprawling
about on piles of chaff in the barns where we were billeted and scraping the mud off our
putties, and in the evening some of the chaps started queueing up for a couple of
wretched wom-out whores who were established in a house at the end of the village. In
the morning, although it was against orders to leave the village, I managed to sneak off
and wander round the ghastly desolation that had once been fields. It was a damp, wintry
kind of morning. All round, of course, were the awful muck and litter of war, the sort of
filthy sordid mess that’s actually worse than a battlefield of corpses. Trees with boughs
torn off them, old shell-holes that had partly filled up again, tin cans, turds, mud, weeds,
clumps of rusty barbed wire with weeds growing through them. You know the feeling
you had when you came out of the line. A stiffened feeling in all your joints, and inside
you a kind of emptiness, a feeling that you’d never again have any interest in anything. It
was partly fear and exhaustion but mainly boredom. At that time no one saw any reason
why the war shouldn’t go on for ever. Today or tomorrow or the day after you were going
back to the line, and maybe next week a shell would blow you to potted meat, but that
wasn’t so bad as the ghastly boredom of the war stretching out for ever.
I was wandering up the side of a hedge when I ran into a chap in our company whose
surname I don’t remember but who was nicknamed Nobby. He was a dark, slouching,
gypsy-looking chap, a chap who even in unifonn always gave the impression that he was
carrying a couple of stolen rabbits. By trade he was a coster and he was a real Cockney,
but one of those Cockneys that make part of their living by hop-picking, bird-catching,
poaching, and fruit-stealing in Kent and Essex. He was a great expert on dogs, ferrets,
cage- birds, fighting-cocks, and that kind of thing. As soon as he saw me he beckoned to
me with his head. He had a sly, vicious way of talking:
“Ere, George! ’ (The chaps still called me George — I hadn’t got fat in those days. )
‘George! Ja see that clump of poplars acrost the field? ’
‘Yes. ’
‘Well, there’s a pool on t’other side of it, and it’s full of bleeding great fish. ’
‘Fish? Gam! ’
‘I tell you it’s bleeding full of ‘em. Perch, they are. As good fish as ever I got my thumbs
on. Com’n see f yerself, then. ’
We trudged over the mud together. Sure enough, Nobby was right. On the other side of
the poplars there was a dirty-looking pool with sandy banks. Obviously it had been a
quarry and had got filled up with water. And it was swanning with perch. You could see
their dark blue stripy backs gliding everywhere just under water, and some of them must
have weighed a pound. I suppose in two years of war they hadn’t been disturbed and had
had time to multiply. Probably you can’t imagine what the sight of those perch had done
to me. It was as though they’d suddenly brought me to life. Of course there was only one
thought in both our minds — how to get hold of a rod and line.
‘Christ! ’ I said. ‘We’ll have some of those. ’
‘You bet we f — well will. C’mon back to the village and let’s get ‘old of some tackle. ’
‘O. K. You want to watch out, though. If the sergeant gets to know we’ll cop it. ’
‘Oh, f — the sergeant. They can ‘ang, drore, and quarter me if they want to. I’m going to
‘ave some of them bleeding fish. ’
You can’t know how wild we were to catch those fish. Or perhaps you can, if you’ve ever
been at war. You know the frantic boredom of war and the way you’ll clutch at almost
any kind of amusement. I’ve seen two chaps in a dugout fight like devils over half a
threepenny magazine. But there was more to it than that. It was the thought of escaping,
for perhaps a whole day, right out of the atmosphere of war. To be sitting under the
poplar trees, fishing for perch, away from the Company, away from the noise and the
stink and the uniforms and the officers and the saluting and the sergeant’s voice! Fishing
is the opposite of war. But it wasn’t at all certain that we could bring it off. That was the
thought that sent us into a kind of fever. If the sergeant found out he’d stop us as sure as
fate, and so would any of the officers, and the worst of all was that there was no knowing
how long we were going to stay at the village. We might stay there a week, we might
march off in two hours. Meanwhile we’d no fishing tackle of any kind, not even a pin or
a bit of string. We had to start from scratch. And the pool was swarming with fish! The
first thing was a rod. A willow wand is best, but of course there wasn’t a willow tree
anywhere this side of the horizon. Nobby shinned up one of the poplars and cut off a
small bough which wasn’t actually good but was better than nothing. He trimmed it down
with his jack-knife till it looked something like a fishing-rod, and then we hid it in the
weeds near the bank and managed to sneak back into the village without being seen.
The next thing was a needle to make a hook. Nobody had a needle. One chap had some
darning needles, but they were too thick and had blunt ends. We daren’t let anyone know
what we wanted it for, for fear the sergeant should hear about it. At last we thought of the
whores at the end of the village. They were pretty sure to have a needle. When we got
there — you had to go round to the back door through a mucky courtyard — the house was
shut up and the whores were having a sleep which they’d no doubt earned. We stamped
and yelled and banged on the door until after about ten minutes a fat ugly woman in a
wrapper came down and screamed at us in French. Nobby shouted at her:
‘Needle! Needle! You got a needle! ’
Of course she didn’t know what he was talking about. Then Nobby tried pidgin English,
which he expected her as a foreigner to understand:
‘Wantee needle! Sewee clothee! Likee thisee! ’
He made gestures which were supposed to represent sewing. The whore misunderstood
him and opened the door a bit wider to let us in. Finally we made her understand and got
a needle from her. By this time it was dinner time.
After dinner the sergeant came round the barn where we were billeted looking for men
for a fatigue. We managed to dodge him just in time by getting under a pile of chaff.
When he was gone we got a candle alight, made the needle red-hot, and managed to bend
it into a kind of hook. We didn’t have any tools except jack- knives, and we burned our
fingers badly. The next thing was a line. Nobody had any string except thick stuff, but at
last we came across a fellow who had a reel of sewing thread. He didn’t want to part with
it and we had to give him a whole packet of fags for it. The thread was much too thin, but
Nobby cut it into three lengths, tied them to a nail in the wall, and carefully plaited them.
Meanwhile after searching all over the village I’d managed to find a cork, and I cut it in
half and stuck a match through it to make afloat. By this time it was evening and getting
on towards dark.
We’d got the essentials now, but we could do with some gut. There didn’t seem much
hope of getting any until we thought of the hospital orderly. Surgical gut wasn’t part of
his equipment, but it was just possible that he might have some. Sure enough, when we
asked him, we found he’d a whole hank of medical gut in his haversack. It had taken his
fancy in some hospital or other and he’d pinched it. We swapped another packet of fags
for ten lengths of gut. It was rotten brittle stuff, in pieces about six inches long. After dark
Nobby soaked them till they were pliable and tied them end to end. So now we’d got
everything — hook, rod, line, float, and gut. We could dig up worms anywhere. And the
pool was swarming with fish! Huge great stripy perch crying out to be caught! We lay
down to kip in such a fever that we didn’t even take our boots off. Tomorrow! If we
could just have tomorrow! If the war would forget about us for just a day! We made up
our minds that as soon as roll-call was over we’d hook it and stay away all day, even if
they gave us Field Punishment No. 1 for it when we came back.
Well, I expect you can guess the rest. At roll-call orders were to pack all kits and be ready
to march in twenty minutes. We marched nine miles down the road and then got on to
lorries and were off to another part of the line. As for the pool under the poplar trees, I
never saw or heard of it again. I expect it got poisoned with mustard gas later on.
Since then I’ve never fished. I never seemed to get the chance. There was the rest of the
war, and then like everyone else I was fighting for a job, and then I’d got a job and the
job had got me. I was a promising young fellow in an insurance office — one of those
keen young businessmen with firm jaws and good prospects that you used to read about
in the Clark’s College adverts — and then I was the usual down-trodden five-to-ten-
pounds-a-weeker in a semidetached villa in the inner-outer suburbs. Such people don’t go
fishing, any more than stockbrokers go out picking primroses. It wouldn’t be suitable.
Other recreations are provided for them.
Of course I have my fortnight’s holiday every summer. You know the kind of holiday.
Margate, Yarmouth, Eastbourne, Hastings, Bournemouth, Brighton. There’s a slight
variation according to whether or not we’re flush that year. With a woman like Hilda
along, the chief feature of a holiday is endless mental arithmetic to decide how much the
boarding-house keeper is swindling you. That and telling the kids, No, they can’t have a
new sandbucket. A few years back we were at Bournemouth. One fine afternoon we
loitered down the pier, which must be about half a mile long, and all the way along it
chaps were fishing with stumpy sea-rods with little bells on the end and their lines
stretching fifty yards out to sea. It’s a dull kind of fishing, and they weren’t catching
anything. Still, they were fishing. The kids soon got bored and clamoured to go back to
the beach, and Hilda saw a chap sticking a lobworm on his hook and said it made her feel
sick, but I kept loitering up and down for a little while longer. And suddenly there was a
tremendous ringing from a bell and a chap was winding in his line. Everyone stopped to
watch. And sure enough, in it came, the wet line and the lump of lead and on the end a
great flat-fish (a flounder, I think) dangling and wriggling. The chap dumped it on to the
planks of the pier, and it flapped up and down, all wet and gleaming, with its grey warty
back and its white belly and the fresh salty smell of the sea. And something kind of
moved inside me.
As we moved off I said casually, just to test Hilda’s reaction:
‘I’ve half a mind to do a bit of fishing myself while we’re here. ’
‘What! YOU go fishing, George? But you don’t even know how, do you? ’
‘Oh, I used to be a great fisherman,’ I told her.
She was vaguely against it, as usual, but didn’t have many ideas one way or the other,
except that if I went fishing she wasn’t coming with me to watch me put those nasty
squashy things on the hook. Then suddenly she got on to the fact that if I was to go
fishing the set-out-that I’d need, rod and reel and so forth, would cost round about a quid.
The rod alone would cost ten bob. Instantly she flew into a temper. You haven’t seen old
Hilda when there’s talk of wasting ten bob. She burst out at me:
‘The IDEA of wasting all that money on a thing like that! Absurd! And how they DARE
charge ten shillings for one of those silly little fishing-rods! It’s disgraceful. And fancy
you going fishing at your age! A great big grown-up man like you. Don’t be such a
BABY, George. ’
Then the kids got on to it. Loma sidled up to me and asked in that silly pert way she has,
‘Are you a baby, Daddy? ’ and little Billy, who at that time didn’t speak quite plain,
announced to the world in general, ‘Farver’s a baby. ’ Then suddenly they were both
dancing round me, rattling their sandbuckets and chanting:
‘Farver’s a baby! Farver’s a baby! ’
Unnatural little bastards!
6
And besides fishing there was reading.
I’ve exaggerated if I’ve given the impression that fishing was the ONLY thing I cared
about. Fishing certainly came first, but reading was a good second. I must have been
either ten or eleven when I started reading — reading voluntarily, I mean. At that age it’s
like discovering a new world. I’m a considerable reader even now, in fact there aren’t
many weeks in which I don’t get through a couple of novels. I’m what you might call the
typical Boots Library subscriber, I always fall for the best-seller of the moment (The
Good Companions, Bengal Lancer, Hatter’s Castle — I fell for every one of them), and
I’ve been a member of the Left Book Club for a year or more. And in 1918, when I was
twenty-five, I had a sort of debauch of reading that made a certain difference to my
outlook. But nothing is ever like those first years when you suddenly discover that you
can open a penny weekly paper and plunge straight into thieves’ kitchens and Chinese
opium dens and Polynesian islands and the forests of Brazil.
It was from when I was eleven to when I was about sixteen that I got my biggest kick out
of reading. At first it was always the boys’ penny weeklies — little thin papers with vile
print and an illustration in three colours on the cover — and a bit later it was books.
Sherlock Holmes, Dr Nikola, The Iron Pirate, Dracula, Raffles. And Nat Gould and
Ranger Gull and a chap whose name I forget who wrote boxing stories almost as rapidly
as Nat Gould wrote racing ones. I suppose if my parents had been a little better educated
I’d have had ‘good’ books shoved down my throat, Dickens and Thackeray and so forth,
and in fact they did drive us through Quentin Durward at school and Uncle Ezekiel
sometimes tried to incite me to read Ruskin and Carlyle. But there were practically no
books in our house. Father had never read a book in his life, except the Bible and
Smiles’s Self Help, and I didn’t of my own accord read a ‘good’ book till much later. I’m
not sorry it happened that way. I read the things I wanted to read, and I got more out of
them than I ever got out of the stuff they taught me at school.
The old penny dreadfuls were already going out when I was a kid, and I can barely
remember them, but there was a regular line of boys’ weeklies, some of which still exist.
The Buffalo Bill stories have gone out, I think, and Nat Gould probably isn’t read any
longer, but Nick Carter and Sexton Blake seem to be still the same as ever. The Gem and
the Magnet, if I’m remembering rightly, started about 1905. The B. O. P. was still rather pi
in those days, but Chums, which I think must have started about 1903, was splendid.
Then there was an encyclopedia — I don’t remember its exact name — which was issued in
penny numbers. It never seemed quite worth buying, but a boy at school used to give
away back numbers sometimes. If I now know the length of the Mississippi or the
difference between an octopus and a cuttle-fish or the exact composition of bell-metal,
that’s where I learned it from.
Joe never read. He was one of those boys who can go through years of schooling and at
the end of it are unable to read ten lines consecutively. The sight of print made him feel
sick. I’ve seen him pick up one of my numbers of Chums, read a paragraph or two and
then turn away with just the same movement of disgust as a horse when it smells stale
hay. He tried to kick me out of reading, but Mother and Father, who had decided that I
was ‘the clever one’, backed me up. They were rather proud that I showed a taste for
‘book-learning’, as they called it. But it was typical of both of them that they were
vaguely upset by my reading things like Chums and the Union Jack, thought that I ought
to read something ‘improving’ but didn’t know enough about books to be sure which
books were ‘improving’. Finally Mother got hold of a second-hand copy of Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs, which I didn’t read, though the illustrations weren’t half bad.
All through the winter of 1905 I spent a penny on Chums every week. I was following up
their serial story, ‘Donovan the Dauntless’. Donovan the Dauntless was an explorer who
was employed by an American millionaire to fetch incredible things from various comers
of the earth. Sometimes it was diamonds the size of golf balls from the craters of
volcanoes in Africa, sometimes it was petrified mammoths’ tusks from the frozen forests
of Siberia, sometimes it was buried Inca treasures from the lost cities of Peru. Donovan
went on a new journey every week, and he always made good. My favourite place for
reading was the loft behind the yard. Except when Father was getting out fresh sacks of
grain it was the quietest place in the house. There were huge piles of sacks to lie on, and a
sort of plastery smell mixed up with the smell of sainfoin, and bunches of cobwebs in all
the corners, and just over the place where I used to lie there was a hole in the ceiling and
a lath sticking out of the plaster. I can feel the feeling of it now. A winter day, just warm
enough to lie still. I’m lying on my belly with Chums open in front of me. A mouse runs
up the side of a sack like a clockwork toy, then suddenly stops dead and watches me with
his little eyes like tiny jet beads. I’m twelve years old, but I’m Donovan the Dauntless.
Two thousand miles up the Amazon I’ve just pitched my tent, and the roots of the
mysterious orchid that blooms once in a hundred years are safe in the tin box under my
camp bed. In the forests all round Hopi-Hopi Indians, who paint their teeth scarlet and
skin white men alive, are beating their war-drums. I’m watching the mouse and the
mouse is watching me, and I can smell the dust and sainfoin and the cool plastery smell,
and I’m up the Amazon, and it’s bliss, pure bliss.
7
That’s all, really.
I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of
when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster, and the chances are that I’ve told you
nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you
don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you. So far I’ve only spoken about the things that
happened to me before I was sixteen. Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the
family. It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what
people call ‘real life’, meaning unpleasantness.
About three days after I’d seen the big carp at Binficld House, Father came in to tea
looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual. He ate his way solemnly
through his tea and didn’t talk much. In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of
eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because
he hadn’t many back teeth left. I was just getting up from table when he called me back.
‘Wait a minute, George, my boy. I got suthing to say to you. Sit down jest a minute.
Mother, you heard what I got to say last night. ’
Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn.
Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal
with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:
‘George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you. I been thinking it over, and it’s about time
you left school. ‘Fraid you’ll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring
home to your mother. I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to
take you away. ’
Of course this was quite according to precedent — his writing to Mr Wicksey before
telling me, I mean. Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged
everything over their children’s heads.
Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations. He’d ‘had bad
times lately’, things had ‘been a bit difficult’, and the upshot was that Joe and I would
have to start earning our living. At that time I didn’t either know or greatly care whether
the business was really in a bad way or not. I hadn’t even enough commercial instinct to
see the reason why things were ‘difficult’. The fact was that Father had been hit by
competition. Sarazins’, the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home
counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield. Six months earlier they’d taken the
lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt
lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas,
it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards’ distance. Sarazins’, besides selling flower seeds,
described themselves as ‘universal poultry and livestock providers’, and apart from wheat
and oats and so forth they went in for patent poultry mixtures, bird-seed done up in fancy
packets, dog-biscuits of all shapes and colours, medicines, embrocations, and
conditioning powders, and branched off into such things as rat- traps, dog-chains,
incubators, sanitary eggs, bird-nesting, bulbs, weed-killer, insecticide, and even, in some
branches, into what they called a ‘livestock department’, meaning rabbits and day-old
chicks. Father, with his dusty old shop and his refusal to stock new lines, couldn’t
compete with that kind of thing and didn’t want to. The tradesmen with their van-horses,
and such of the farmers as dealt with the retail seedsmen, fought shy of Sarazins’, but in
six months they’d gathered in the petty gentry of the neighbourhood, who in those days
had carriages or dogcarts and therefore horses. This meant a big loss of trade for Father
and the other corn merchant, Winkle. I didn’t grasp any of this at the time. I had a boy’s
attitude towards it all. I’d never taken any interest in the business. I’d never or hardly
ever served in the shop, and when, as occasionally happened, Father wanted me to run an
errand or give a hand with something, such as hoisting sacks of grain up to the loft or
down again, I’d always dodged it whenever possible. Boys in our class aren’t such
complete babies as public schoolboys, they know that work is work and sixpence is
sixpence, but it seems natural for a boy to regard his father’s business as a bore. Up till
that time fishing-rods, bicycles, fizzy lemonade, and so forth had seemed to me a good
deal more real than anything that happened in the grown-up world.
Father had already spoken to old Grimmett, the grocer, who wanted a smart lad and was
willing to take me into the shop immediately. Meanwhile Father was going to get rid of
the errand boy, and Joe was to come home and help with the shop till he got a regular job.
Joe had left school some time back and had been more or less loafing ever since. Father
had sometimes talked of ‘getting him into’ the accounts department at the brewery, and
earlier had even had thoughts of making him into an auctioneer. Both were completely
hopeless because Joe, at seventeen, wrote a hand like a ploughboy and couldn’t repeat the
multiplication table. At present he was supposed to be ‘learning the trade’ at a big bicycle
shop on the outskirts of Walton. Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most half-
wits, had a slight mechanical turn, but he was quite incapable of working steadily and
spent all his time loafing about in greasy overalls, smoking Woodbines, getting into
fights, drinking (he’s started that already), getting ‘talked of with one girl after another,
and sticking Father for money. Father was worried, puzzled, and vaguely resentful. I can
see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his
spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him.
For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty
pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t
understand it. He’d inherited the business from his father, he’d done an honest trade,
worked hard, sold sound goods, swindled nobody — and his profits were going down. He
said a number of times, between sucking at his teeth to get the crumb out, that times were
very bad, trade seemed very slack, he couldn’t think what had come over people, it
wasn’t as if the horses didn’t have to eat. Perhaps it was these here motors, he decided
finally. ‘Nasty smelly things! ’ Mother put in. She was a little worried, and knew that she
ought to be more so. Once or twice while Father was talking there was a far-away look in
her eyes and I could see her lips moving. She was trying to decide whether it should be a
round of beef and carrots tomorrow or another leg of mutton. Except when there was
something in her own line that needed foresight, such as buying linen or saucepans, she
wasn’t really capable of thinking beyond tomorrow’s meals. The shop was giving trouble
and Father was worried — that was about as far as she saw into it. None of us had any
grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and lost money, but was he
really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t
know what was happening to him, he wasn’t capable of foreseeing that these Sarazin
people would systematically under-sell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he?
Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man. All he knew was that times
were bad, trade was very ‘slack’, very ‘slow’ (he kept repeating these phrases), but
probably things would Took up presently’.
It would be nice if I could tell you that I was a great help to my father in his time of
trouble, suddenly proved myself a man, and developed qualities which no one had
suspected in me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you used to read in the uplift
novels of thirty years ago. Or alternatively I’d like to be able to record that I bitterly
resented having to leave school, my eager young mind, yearning for knowledge and
refinement, recoiled from the soulless mechanical job into which they were thrusting
me — and so on and so forth, like the stuff you read in the uplift novels today.
