the doctor's, some time soon after Christmas. There was a great crowd of strange boys and girls whom I had got to like and hate, or be indifferent to, for a few hours, and probably never saw or thought of for another twelve months. Most were older than myself; some, I was conscious, had parents who were richer or of different class; we were restrained and suspicious of one another, and the only unquestionably good things there were the mince pies, jellies, sausage rolls — Now and then we visited friends in Lambeth, where my father and mother had lived from their marriage up to the time of their removal to Wakehurst Road when I was about two.
I remember the girls faintly, not so as to describe them, but well enough to wish that I could see them again to revive their images. In most houses I had at least a preference for one of the girls and liked to be teased afterwards for having kissed her in a game of forfeits, or for shouting her name up the chimney.
II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS
When I think of school I smell carbolic soap. I see the caretaker by the wall of one room ringing the bell. I deposit my weekly fourpence on the master's desk. I go round, as a privilege, filling the scores of inkpots from a tin with a long thin spout. I join in the one-verse hymn before and after lessons. I see large light bare rooms with a map or two, and boys in long parallel desks facing a master; for we were soon separated from the girls. We repeated aloud "Witney on the Windrush manufactures Blankets". We learned the names of the tributaries of the Thames for ever and ever. What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never fired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line
[13]
of the Hebrides I think I actually loved. One of the masters, named Jones, was little, with dark prominent eyes, round plump red face and quick steps and fiery temper; another, named Spragg, was a tall fairer bony man, who had a deep resonant voice; and I think that once when the two quarrelled the tall one lifted the little one into the air. There was a third named Wigley, a mild man, a chewer of his moustache, who struck me as feeble even before Spragg got the better of him in a tussle. The head master was short, square-shouldered, lean, pallid, bearded, took long rapid strides with head low and projecting, flat high overhanging forehead, deep-set eyes, always on the verge of anger, a harsh barking voice, a general expression of dark solitary determination. He appeared unexpectedly from time to time in the several classrooms which I passed through in the course of three or four years. Sometimes he went by me in the street, his hands in his black overcoat pockets, an umbrella under his arm, overtaking everybody, with rapid sidelong dark glances. I remember crawling in and bursting out, but very little about school itself. We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, parsing, were easy to me, and I did them pretty well. Sometimes things were tediously easy to me, sometimes I took a pleasure in overcoming what looked hard and of course in earning praise, reward, a superior position. I rather liked wearing the numbered ticket on examination days, and took pride in having the numbers neatly printed in black ink with a 4 rather than an open 4 and so on, as I did in saying, when questioned, that my father was an "Officer" in the Civil Service. Discipline was strict. I think I must have been usually fully employed, save for glances at the clock. At any rate I know more about what I did before and after than in school.
The one moment in school at this time which I cannot forget is when I found myself being lifted from a grating where I
[14]
had fallen, having been hit hard in the stomach by a boy on my way from the classroom to the main exit. In the hard asphalt playground we played rounders and egg-cap and games with tops, marbles and cherrystones. Going home, we spun our tops or two of us helped ourselves along by bowling hoops or by playing a progressive game with a marble or a stone each, called Buckalong. We used to exchange things and ratify the deed by touching the iron with which our heels were shod, saying "touch cold iron can"t change back".
We used to make fun of a solitary boy, probably of a better class than ourselves, who used to live in the same street and walked about with a snake round his wrist. We called him "Soppy", prepared to run away. But he never retaliated or took any notice of us.
My friends were chiefly boys of our street; if other boys harassed us we used to say "My father's a policeman" to frighten them. But only one grievance remains in my mind, that an older boy, not of my acquaintance, once lured me to drink urine by offering it to me in a bottle as ginger-beer.
Some time later on a Sunday I pointed out this boy standing with others by the Three Island Pond, and my father clouted his head.
School was not an affliction, but church or chapel or Sunday school was. At an early age I did not go regularly, nor I think did my parents. They were sober reverent people without a creed, though their disbelief in Hell and the Devil almost amounted to a creed. My father and I made merry over the Devil and the folly of believing in him as we supposed many did. He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel. Here from the prickly silence of two hundred or three hundred people I gradually came to feel a mild poison steadily creeping into me on all sides. I never made a friend of any of the boys who attended there. A deathly solemnity filled the chapel. After the service couples walked to and fro or gathered into knots on the pavement
[15]
outside. The deathly solemnity was strong enough to cling about the people even there in the sunlight: some of them it accompanied to their one o"clock roast beef or mutton. But at first the Sunday-school was my particular allowance. I liked singing and liked the melodies of "Jerusalem the Golden" and "Fair waved the golden corn", and I liked going with all the rest for the annual treat somewhere in Surrey, where I could run about in a wood, become fond of another girl or two (I remember one with a very deep but I think also husky voice), eat bread and butter, watercress and slices of cake and drink tea. The confinement in the schoolroom was not quite a positive ill. It was regular, it was inevitable, and until later on there was usually nothing in particular of which it deprived me except liberty. But Sunday was a had day and this was the worst part of it. That deathly solemnity, whether we respected it or not, was equally thick in the schoolroom. I became accustomed to making a sort of drug of boredom. I did not rebel, but taking this poison became fairly oblivious to the good or evil that befell Jesus Christ, or Servetus, or myself. Moreover, I did positively loathe with continuous loathing the trailing with one or more of my brothers along the Sunday streets, in our stiff Sunday clothes and our Sunday hats. I hated these clothes and hats and I felt also that they made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. If the hat was blown off by the wind it was some relief: and I could then stamp on the thing and put it down to the wind and mud. What wonder that I made no friends under this Upas-tree.
The majority of the children came from homes poorer or less refined than mine, and with the exception of one or two girls whom I thought pretty I looked down on them though ever so lightly. The few boys whose parents knew ours, if they never visited one another, never became our friends. Some suspiciousness existed between us which our best clothing did not permit us to destroy. Chapel and Sunday-school were to me cruel ceremonious punishments for the freedom of Monday to
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Saturday. I have still a profound quiet detestation of Sunday in whatever part of England or Wales it overtakes me, but most of all in London. I think I began learning to hate crowds and societies, and grown-up people, and black clothes, and silk hats and neatly folded umbrellas and shining walking-sticks, and everything that seemed a circling part of that deathly solemnity as I was not. Nevertheless, I may have looked decidedly a part of it with my shy bored silence, my fear of disagreement or quarrel in public, and my thin long narrow face that always shrank and chilled and stiffened into solemnity under the gaze of grown-up people, strangers, and numbers. There was, however, always one good thing about Sunday, and that was the biscuits, two large oval ones or one of these and two small round ones, which I found on a bedside chair upon awaking. The crumbs of these biscuits among the sheets became a nuisance; for we got up later on Sundays than weekdays.
The best of life was passed out of the house and out of school. I remember going out for the first time after scarlet fever. Perhaps because the spirit of many days had been stored up within me untouched, I felt that I was very strong and could do anything. I started to run; the eagerness of the spirit was overmuch; I stumbled and fell down.
One Christmas morning I woke up and felt a long lean smooth straight cold thing with straps at my bedside. It had a handle, and pulling that with one hand I brought out what I discovered to be a sword, while in the other hand was a scabbard. The daylight came upon me still unsheathing and sheathing the sword, trying hard for the hundredth time to put it back the wrong way. As soon as I could I fastened the belt round my waist so that the sword hung on the right instead of the left side and went out alone. The streets were empty. I was proud though without spectators. Once or twice the weapon caught between my legs. I marched up the street, crossed the road separating it from the Common and turned to the left between the
[17]
elm-trees of Bolingbroke Grove, having the road upon my left, the Common upon my right.
[MABEL LOOMS]
At the top of one of the streets parallel to ours, but at that time divided from it by that big private meadow with the pond and elm-trees, I stopped and looked down. For there lived Mabel Looms, a schoolfellow whom I adored. She had had a Christmas card from me that morning. The street was empty. I walked backwards and forwards along the Grove past the top of the street, waiting, sufficiently proud not to be overcome by long disappointment. How many times since have I waited thus for somebody, with a dog's patience. There began to be others in the streets. At last Mabel came up towards the Common, in the company of some elders. Without a sign I continued walking backwards and forwards. They turned to their left at the top, away from our street. I turned in the opposite direction homeward, pleased with my swinging sword and believing that the passers-by admired it. At home they knew well where I had been.
My attachment to Mabel lasted for several years and more than once after it had been broken I attempted to renew it. She was a perfect loving friend. I thought her beautiful. Her hair was light brown, her face round rather than a long face. She had elder sisters — one named Agnes — whom I did not always like; and a brother named Arthur to whom I was indifferent; and a freckled slighter cousin, with a name something like Catherine Haythorn, whom I liked equally for her own and for Mabel's sake.
Girls practically never joined in our games: even bowling our iron hoops beside their wooden ones was rare. Those girls who did play much with boys were scandalously talked about, but they were older than I was, and I neither knew nor know anything positive against them. I only have an idea that I had seen one of them — a deep-voiced dark-skinned good-looking girl who walked with long strides and a slight stoop — coming from among thick bushes with a boy or two boys. This caused laughter and was afterwards mentioned with hints and jeers
[18]
which I do not think I understood: I became fairly curious and expectant; the veil over the sex thickened.
The Common and the streets leading up to it were the scene of our principal game. It was played chiefly on Saturday, our whole holiday. We assembled, for example, at the top of the road in the well-trodden garden of a doctor who had a rowdy son; each bringing a weapon or several weapons, wooden swords and pikes, or daggers, shields, pistols, bows, arrows and with horns and trumpets, and perhaps some bread and cheese and an apple or orange. There sides were chosen. One side went out to seek a fort in someone's garden or among the gorse bushes. Ten minutes later the other set forth, often in two divisions.
Sometimes stealth was the rule of expedition, we advanced whispering and in some order. Sometimes everyone was shouting for his own plans and against another's. At other times the methods alternated, the stealth would become wearisome, we began to chatter and disagree, or the riot of anarchy would suddenly strike us as wrong, everyone said "hush", and for some minutes we modelled ourselves on Sioux, Mohicans or Hurons, crouching, pausing, trying to hush the sound of our breathing. We forgot everything in this Indian ideal.
[BIT MISSING?]
the enemy had to be found. Nor were they loth. Someone was sure to show himself and wave defiance, or to leap out on us, supposing we passed by. If seen at a distance they might change the stronghold and there would be a chase. If they were content to stand a storm, the second army would gather all its numbers together and, with yells and counter-yells, batter and push them out or be battered and pushed out itself. The struggle was one of character, not weapons. The side possessing the fiercest and most stubborn boys won. The winners would than in turn fortify themselves and sustain an attack; and so it went on, until a mealtime, or nightfall, or rain, or a serious quarrel, finished the war.
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grammar-school standard looked down upon the Board-school boys, or "Boardy Blags' (i.e. blackguards). The Board-school boys resented this. The feud was usually hardly in so much as a smouldering condition, and so far as I know must have been all but forgotten. Then suddenly it would flame out. A loose army of Board-school boys several score strong moved along the Grove at the edge of the Common towards the enemy's school. The army was continually being swelled from the side streets. With all the smaller or more timid boys hanging on its fringes, more angry than warlike, more curious than angry, the numbers were considerable. Stones were the long-distance weapons. But rarely, I think, did both sides muster a fairly equal army at the same time.
As a relaxation we hung about in corners smoking cigarettes of rolled brown paper. Making these, lighting them, puffing them, coughing, relighting them, asking one another if they were alight, and silently enjoying the act and the seclusion, filled hours. Our sense of discipline was slight and transient. It was not encouraged by doing lessons, a few ridiculous exercises under the eye of an unsleeping master, and playing mostly individualist games in the playground. Being in a little mob increased our boldness and also our ease and safety. According to our tempers, I
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think we hoped that the others would either shelter us or support us in doing signal deeds. As member of the army, any one of us could most likely insult a passing outsider with impunity: if, however, there had been any swift retaliation the victim of it would often have been left to suffer alone. Therefore the armies did not always wait for a formal order of disbandment.
The Common, for example, offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and in little thickets. Tall elms and poplars stood about irregularly. And the level spaces suitable for cricket, football and tennis were not many.
With this variety the Common, even though the railway ran through it parallel to Bolingbroke Grove and only two or three hundred yards away from it, was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops. For any kind of hiding and hunting games the thickets were excellent. We played the other games in the open spaces.
The ponds were for paddling in. One of them, a shallow irregular one, weedy and rushy-margined, lying then in some broken ground between the Three Island and the railway, was full of effets [eft, newt] and frogs. Bigger boys would torture the frogs, by cuffing, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat which was the operating table. The seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. At that time I could not have done it myself, but my horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity. I fished
[21]
Bigger boys used to fish in the Penn Ponds at Richmond Park and allowed me to buy from them a perch of four or five inches long, which looked magnificent with its dark bars, standing almost on its head in my little round bowl. There in spite of worms and breadcrumbs it shortly afterwards died. I was pained at coming down in the morning and finding such a magnificent, uncommon and costly creature dead. Nor did I ever like the perch's stiff hard prickly corpse, faded in death, and looking much smaller out of the bowl than inside.
[22]
The streets were a playground almost equal to the Common. The labyrinth of them, all running at right angles and parallel to one anther, with some culs de sac, could be mastered but indefinitely extended; every month or two I should think I added a street or two to my knowledge. Alone or with others I bowled my hoop up and down them either in purposeless pleasure or on some errand for my mother. Best of all errands was to the blacksmith's to have a broken hoop mended. The smithy was a primeval forest cave that broke a line of ordinary shops. The bellows snored, the sparks spouted up, and the pallid, gaunt, bare-armed man made the anvil ring its double or its single song. When it was very cold I ran along with hands in pockets striking sparks out of the rough kerbstone with my ironshod heel.
At night we often played games of hide and seek with lanterns. We picked up sides, fixed the boundaries which were not to be exceeded, and laid down rules against hiding in our own houses. One side went out to hide, to be followed in a few minutes by most of the other side, except one or two who were left behind to guard the home, which the other side had to reach without being touched. Setting out with bull's-eye shining and a good companion, and exposing the others behind laurel bushes and catching them after a chase; or ourselves being the quarry and eluding capture for the whole evening whether with constant obedience to rules or not — these were great joys. If the game became monotonous we rang people's bells and ran away, or we went into shops and asked for sweets with ridiculous names just invented by ourselves.
On Saturday sometimes I would go to Lambeth, two miles away, to take a message or a parcel for my mother, riding back by tram, or walking in order to spend the fare on sweets. I remember once, too, walking to Chelsea and back with an elder boy. As we went along the far side of the Thames he explained to me why it was women could plunge from greater heights into water than men.
The Battersea side of the
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river was strewn with prodigious broken architecture very impressive to me and seeming of unknown giant antiquity.
When I was eight or nine, the boundaries of my domain were stretched by several miles all at once. I walked to Wimbledon Common. Of the first visit I have no recollection. But I can distinguish two later visits: one because I discovered the joy of throwing stones over into the unknown depths of a great garden and hearing the glass-house break; another because I limped all the way back with a low shoe gone wrong. I did not go alone, but as one of several hangers-on to older boys and girls. We fished here and there with hopes of better things than came out of the Wandsworth Common ponds. We met strange boys there who occasionally possessed or talked about enviable fish.
The three-mile walk was, however, good in itself, whether we went by Wandsworth, Earlsfield, or Wimbledon. We always recognized the old landmarks with pleasure and a kind of surprise. There would be a cage of pigeons or rabbits or guinea-pigs to look at outside a cornchandler's, or an old man with some trait of surliness or quaintness whom we hoped to see again, or a chestnut-tree where we had to stop to throw up at the "conkers', or a shop where we had once bought a specially good halfpenny cake. Other shops and houses had an altogether indescribable charm.
Then Allfarthing Lane was worth going down for its name's sake. We invented explanations and repeated those of our parents. At the top dwelt an old woman in what looked a one-room but who presumably knew and had something to do with the origin of the queer name. But above all, whichever way we took, the Wandel had to be crossed. Going by Wimbledon we had to cross the bridge by the copper mill. You might stop to look down at the fish or along at the fishermen, or to carve your name on the parapet. In Wandsworth there were two bridges, fishermen hanging over the less frequented one who were never seen catching anything but never exhausted our curiosity. But best of all was the middle way
[24]
through Earlsfield, crossing the Wandel at the paper mills. The smell of the mills wafted over a mile and a half on certain still evenings gave me a quiet sort of poetic delight. Hereby the water ran over a steep artificial slant, swiff, glittering, and sounding; and sometimes we stayed here and caught minnows instead of going on to Wimbledon. It was the first place where I saw and realized the beauty of bright running water. We paddled with our stockings in our shoes and our shoes tied together and slung over our shoulders. We talked and laughed and shouted and splashed the water. I cannot remember cold or rain or any clouds there. Perhaps we went away for a part of each summer holiday. If we did, I have forgotten. We went several times to stop with my father's mother at Swindon, and once at least to Brighton on a Sunday. At Brighton the shops were shut. It seemed very much like London. The close smell of meat steam in a restaurant where we had dinner will not altogether vanish. I went out in the Skylark and was sick.
III. HOLIDAYS
Swindon was a thousand times better. It was delicious to pass Wantage, Challow, Uffington, Shrivenham, to see the 75th, 76th mile marks by the railwayside, to slow down at last to the cry of 'swindon" and see my grandmother, my uncle or my aunt waiting. My aunt was an attendant in the refreshment bar, and sometimes gave me a cake or sandwich to eat amid the smell of spirits, or took me to the private apartments, talking in a high bright voice and showing me round to various other neat women in black with high bright voices and nothing but smiles and laughs. My uncle was a fitter in the Great Western Railway works and knew everybody. He was tall, easygoing, and had a pipe in his mouth and very likely a dog at his heels. I was proud to be with him as he nodded to the one-legged signalman and the man with a white apron and a long hammer for tapping the wheels of all the carriages.
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The look of the town pleased me altogether. I could think no ill of houses built entirely of stone instead of brick, especially as they seemed to exist chiefly to serve as avenues by which I happily approached to my grandmother's. It was for me a blessed place. The stonework, the flowers in the gardens, the Wiltshire accent, the rain if it was raining, the sun if it was shining, the absence of school and schoolmaster and most ordinary forms of compulsion — everything was paradisal. Nor room ever was as cosy as my grandmother's kitchen. Its open range was always bright. There was a pair of bellows frequently in use. A brass turnspit hung from under the mantelpiece. The radiant steel trivet was excellent in itself but often bore a load of girdle cakes or buttered toast or more substantial things. An old brown earthenware teapot stood eternally upon the hob. Tea-caddies, brass candlesticks, clay pipes and vases full of spills, stood on the mantelpiece. On its walls hung coloured engravings entitled 'spring" and 'summer" and painted in England some time before the Fall, and photographs of me and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinets and Mr. Gladstone, of Belle Bilton, and of an uncle who had died long before I was born. There were chairs and there was an old mahogany table piano at one side. The smell of "Westward Ho" tobacco hung about the room. My uncle got us chatting instantly. He seemed grown up, yet a boy, by the way he laughed, whistled and sang a bit of a gay tune. At supper, with our bread and cheese, or cold bacon, or hot faggots, or chitterlings, and pickles, he would now and then give us a little tumbler, or "tot", of ale. My grandmother being all important, omnipotent, omnipresent if not omniscient, she stood out less. She marketed, cooked, cleaned, did everything. She made pies with a pastry a full inch thick, and many different undulant fruit tarts on plates. Above all, she made doughy cakes, of dough, allspice and many raisins, which were as much better than other cakes as Swindon was better than other towns, and always as much better than other so-called
[26]
doughy cakes. She knew, too, where to get butter which taught me how divine a thing butter can be made. On the other hand, she was a Conservative and a churchwoman. Without her, these holidays would have been impossible, and she gave me countless pleasures. But if I loved her it was largely because of these things, not instinctively or because she loved me. She was marvellously kind and necessary but we were never close together; and, when there was any quarrel, contempt mingled with my hate of her inheritance from semi-rural Wales of George the Fourth's time. She was bigoted, worldly, crafty, narrow-minded, and ungenerous, as I very early began to feel. She read her Bible and sang hymns to herself, sometimes in Welsh. She also sang Welsh songs that were not hymns, in particular one that an old beggar used to sing at Tredegar when she was a girl, something about a son whom the mother was begging not to be married. When she wanted to warn me against going fishing some miles off with a strange man she hinted
that he might be Jack the Ripper. She first took me to church. Clad in those uncomfortable clothes, I walked beside her, who looked more uncomfortable in her layers of black. I felt that everyone enjoyed being stiff, solemn, black, except myself. On entering the church she bent forward to pray, dragging me down with her to blur my sight for a similar period. I rose with an added awkwardness in gazing at the grim emotionless multitudes of hats, bonnets, and bare heads. It was an inexplicable conspiracy for an hour's self-torture. The service was a dreary discomfort in which the hymns were green isles. When all was over, we crept with a shuffle, a pause, a shuffle, a pause, out to the tombstones and the astonishing fresh light. I was introduced to other women and discussed. I was always being told how like my mother I was and how tall for my age. My grandmother took me to several old Welshwomen, and they all said, "He's a regular — ." They used to remark how well my father was doing, my grandfather
[27]
who had long been dead having only been a fitter. To hide something from me, they spoke in Welsh. Sometimes I was more elaborately shown off. Behind a shop smelling of bacon, butter and acid sweets, I stood up before a stout woman smelling a little less strongly of the same, to recite The Charge of the Light Brigade". My reward was a penny or a screw of sweets. The only visit of this kind which I enjoyed was to a farmhouse a mile away, though I can only recall the walk, the various gates, the best parlour with a Bible in the window between the lace curtains, and the glass of warm milk. Between her and my uncle who kept the house going I saw much bickering. Spending most of his evenings out at club or public-house, he neglected the garden and I dare say other things. I dimly knew that he was usually courting a farmer's daughter somewhere a few miles out, not always the same one. Sometimes when I was walking with him the girl appeared and joined us and at twilight I returned alone.
The little ivy-covered house, therefore, though I enjoyed the meals and evenings there, was above all a convenient centre for games and rambles. In my earlier visits the rambles of any length were on a Sunday with my uncle. He and I and usually my next brother who was two years younger would set out after a late breakfast. The Club was the first stop. It seemed to be full of grown men in a good temper and very much like schoolboys over their ale, their pipes of shag or "Westward Ho", their Reynolds News. My uncle would tell them a little about us. They chaffed us. The men talked or whispered. Then before we were really impatient my uncle drained his glass and we got on to the canal-side of the town, not without greetings or a word or two from men lounging in their backgardens over their vegetables, their fowls and pigeons. We kept to the canal for a mile or two, and sometimes another man joined us. The roach played in the deep green streams among the reeds, many of them bigger than any fish we had ever caught, here and there a
[28]
monster. Better still my uncle would discover a long thin jack close inshore as if anchored. If it did not shoot out with a kick and a swirl of water my uncle probably aimed at it with a stone. One great jack excited us by leaping again and again out of the water, at times so near the bank that we made sure he was ours. But the chief Sunday sport was with water rats. We were fascinated as men yelled encouragements, threats, advice, or praises, and a terrier swam down a rat in spite of its divings. When no dog was handy a rat surprised in mid-stream was a good mark for a stone, a snake's head a more difficult one. The moorhens in the reeds had no more mercy from them, but more often than not escaped. A dead dog was a good deal better than nothing. Not that we were unhappy without something for a mark. We threw flat stones to make ducks and drakes along the sunny water, or sheltering from rain under one of the low stone bridges plunged heavy stones with all our might down into the black depth.
Alongside the canal were many narrow copses of oak with underwood of ash and willow, the resorts of lovers and gamblers. The pleasantest thing I ever did in them at that time was to peel rings off the bark of a willow stick, in imitation of a carter's brass-ringed whip. My uncle taught us. He could also fashion a whistle by slipping the bark whole off a section of willow, but I never could. Or he made a "cat" or "catty" by tapering both ends of a round stick six inches long. Hit at one end by a downward blow from a longer stick the cat rose spinning up into the air and had then to be slashed horizontally as far as possible. My uncle could play tipcat better than any boy. In these copses or in the hedges or roadside trees, as we went along, he pointed out the nests. And then at one o"clock after another visit to the Club, home to a dinner of lamb, green peas, and mint-sauce, followed by rhubarb tart and custard. Perhaps it was a little later that I first went out fishing with my uncle. He had not the
[29]
patience of a fisherman. But there was nothing he did not know: the very winch that he used was made in the factory surreptitiously. He caught roach, and before long I followed him. Even better than this was the sport of seeing him confound the water bailiff who asked for his licence. What with gay lies, chaff and threats, the man had to go. We feared nothing at my uncle's side. These, however, were special week-end delights, for Saturday afternoons or Sundays. The rest of the week was spent mainly in the streets, on the canal-side adjacent, and in the nearer meadows. I liked seeing the thousands of men going by on pavement and roadway for ten minutes before work started and after it ended at the factory. The variety of staid men and jaunty men, old men and boys, tall and stocky men, the frowners and the smilers, fascinated me with endless indolent inarticulate half-conjectures; and suddenly out of the multitude my uncle — or for a moment once or twice a man extremely like him. Straight out of that mysterious pageant, the one positively and entirely living one, he used to come into the house, into the kitchen, into his chair and begin to eat. The slower thinner weekly procession to market was the other great sight. Curious wizened old men with old hats, enormously stout women with shawls and black bonnets, smiling rosy ones with feathers, drove by. Their little carts were laden with eggs, butter, fowls, rabbits, and vegetables, from Lydiard and Shaw and Parton and Wootton Bassett. One or two always stopped at our gate, and the woman came to the door with a broad flat basket of eggs or butter under a cloth, and very rarely, some mushrooms. She said, "Good morning. How are you this morning? Got your little grandson here again. Nice weather we"re having. Mustn"t grumble. Yes, the butter's one-and-two now — " While my grandmother went for her purse I stood at the open door and looked at the shrewd cheerful woman or at her dog who had come for a moment from under
[30]
the cart. She with her cheerful and shrewd slow way was as strange and attractive as any poet's or romancer's woman became afterwards, as far away from my world. I never knew her name, nor did she use ours.
I very soon knew a score of boys living near. I could tell them about London and share with them the young carrots stolen from my grandmother's garden. I got some credit with them by telling them that at home we got our coal a ton at a time; for they were all sons of fitters or even labourers at the factory, earning smaller salaries than my father. They in turn taught me their speech and their games.
The best game was an evening one, called Urkey. One boy who was Urkey stood still by a tin can while the others hid. When a shout told that they had found a hiding he went in search of them. His object was to see one and run home to the can, crying "I Urkey Johnny Williams'. If the one thus singled out, or any other, could get to the can first and kicked it away, the game began all over again. Otherwise the one successfully Urkied had to take his place at the can. We used to have eggs boiled brown in coffee grounds at Easter, and to wear an oak-spray on May 29, "Oak Apple Day".
In August we went together to the Fete in the Park and had a bag of cake, and tickets for roundabouts. But my strongest and most often considered memory of this period was my second visit to Wales at the age of nine. It is associated with an incident which preceded and almost frustrated it.
One evening after tea I went up on to Wandsworth Common with some bigger boys and sat on the seat by the Box Pond. A cigar was produced, lit and given to me to smoke. A few minutes afterwards I was crawling down the road by giddily clinging to the railings of garden after garden. I slunk into the house neglecting my mother's question "What's the matter?" but soon answering it by deeds not words. My father said that I should not go to Wales. Nevertheless, I went.
I remember the names of the stations, "Risca", "Cross Keys" . . . I walked
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through a park among great trees that stood at stately distances from one another: there were long-horned shaggy cattle about. I saw the river Ebbw racing over stones, and mountain ash trees on rough rising ground. I saw chimneys and smoke and ruins and whitewashed walls. I stopped at Abertillery with friends and met Welsh people who spoke no English. Above all I remember a house alone on a hill with a parrot and a dark girl named Rachel, pretty and dirty, who was down on her knees scrubbing the kitchen hearth. I made friends with the boy and the girl of the house in Abertillery and played with them among rolls of stuff in a dark shop. With my mother I drove out along a road among trees and above running water to Pontypool. I went to Aberbeg . . . . That is all the stuff of an abiding memory. These things joined forces with the street in Caerleon, the river and the Round Table, and also with phrases and images from The Adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, and a curious illusion of a knight with a shield kneeling at the foot of a pillar in the photograph at home of Tintern Abbey. When I returned to London and school and a question was asked about a Welsh town beginning, the teacher hinted, with Aber, I frantically raised my hand muttering Abertillery, Abertillery, sorely distressed at being unnoticed, at being positively rebuked with Aberdare, which I had never heard of. But a nucleus had been formed, to which I gradually added fact and legend, the legend, e g., I know not how true, that an ancestor, a sea-captain, riding home from Neath with money killed a man who set upon him to rob him.
At about this time I went to stay at my great-uncle's house at Limpley Stoke: it may, in fact, have been part of the same holiday which took me to Wales. The deep husky voice out of my uncle's beard, the goat in the garden who playfully butted the old man and drove me down the steps of the area, a story of a pet monkey who burst and died from overeating, and a vision of pale quarries, are the absurd
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total of my recollection. After the visit my uncle sent me a French Dilectus with the hope that I should soon master "the French genders'.
I was now comparatively good at lessons, enjoyed excelling, only once played truant and did not enjoy it, was hardly ever caned, and earned a leather-bound gilt-edged New Testament as a prize. And at home I read many books of travel, natural history and fiction. As birthday or Christmas presents I received The Compleat Angler; The Marvels of the Polar World, about ice, snow, Esquimaux and seals, and other books containing picturesque descriptions of torrid or frozen lands; Dick's Holidays and what he did with them, an adult's chronicle of a boy's country holiday, with insidious information on every page; Hans Andersen, Grimm, Holme Leigh's Fairy Tales, The Swiss Family Robinson, Westward Ho! . . . Thus I grew to think of places where jaguars lay in wait for men upon overhanging branches and of times when houses were made of barley sugar and witches cooked children and ate them. I was still well content to remain, except during these readings, a citizen's son of London in the "eighties of the nineteenth century, but a citizen with a sometimes fantastically light grasp of facts, as when I slipped a letter addressed to my father in one part of the country inside a newspaper for my mother in another part.
Part of the pleasure of a book was still, I think, the strangeness of words as well as things. Thus I was arrested by the quaintness of Izaak Walton's spelling, as in "pearch" for perch, of his archaic names such as "luce" for pike, of unfamiliar personal names like those of the travellers Speke and Grant, as well as by the nasty horror of Africans eating fat torn from a live human body in Sir Samuel Baker's book. These things were no less and no more remote than the fairy tales. I did not often feel that they were part of my world of newspapers, a comfortable home and a clockwork school. But several houses became associated with certain wonders out of books, either by accident or because at some point they resembled places in
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the books. The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibals' footprints. In return, there were people and houses without associations possessing qualities in common with the people and houses in wonderful books, and I cannot decide whether my life owed more to my books or my books more to my life. I slipped from one world into the other as easily as from room to room.
I do not know how much I may have dwelt on the story in later years, but Grimm's Hansel and Grethel, the children going out into the wood to be lost, dropping a trail of stones behind them and finding their way back, but failing to do so when they used breadcrumbs which the birds ate, came to be to my mind one of the great stories of the world.
IV. BOOKS AND SCHOOL FRIENDS
For the most part I remember rather the joy of having and reading books than particular passages. I remember the eager walks over Wandsworth Common to borrow volume after volume of the Waverley novels, but of Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Peveril of the Peak and The Talisman, not a rack is left. Of The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder rather more is left. They gave me an idea of a noble savage. The Pathfinder himself towers in memory as grandly as Milton's Satan but more dimly. The name of the girl Cora has folded itself up in my mind like a gentle snake . . . . I read some of Scott's poems in the same year. They made deeper impressions than the novels. I was continually repeating with a throb:
With Chester charge and Lancashire, or Charge, Chester, charge!
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On Stanley on Were the last words of Marmion.
The duel between FitzJames and Roderick Dhu was the greatest thing of all. The next best was Roderick Dhu's whistle that caused armed warriors suddenly to rise up out of the mountain bracken. I could scarcely bear the excitement of describing these scenes to another boy as we walked along Bolingbroke Grove. My voice was thick and broken with the effort of "And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu". The excitement caused a not entirely unpleasant aching tenderness in a certain part, just as open praise did and still does. Of course when I found a family of Rodericks in Swindon I linked them to the poem. The only poems which I remember having read aloud to me at an early age were Longfellow's. My father used to read or recite The Children's Hour very often. The pathos, or his sense of it, touched me, and I received faint but delicious images of "grave Alice" and "laughing Allegra" and "Edith with golden hair". I could also enjoy impressions in the minor key.
The only one of the many songs we sang at school which I can recall was in the minor key. It was a kind of dirge for a North American Indian. I can still hum the melody, but I remember no more of the words than "Far far away in the depths of the wild wood". These were several times repeated. The rhyme to "wild wood" was I believe "childhood". I used to sing this to myself, and have periodically returned to it ever since. I liked also "Lucy Gray", the one poem which I remember to have learnt at the Board-school: but I never could understand "and snapped a faggot band". I do not think I had any tangible sadness to which the song gave utterance.
There was for me at that time no sadness, e g., in the destruction of the orchard of the great house near by, and the portioning of its park-like meadow into streets. Anybody could enter now. We pillaged artichokes. Some boys took sackfuls of the soil and I helped one to drag his down the street; out of the wounds
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thus worn in it, it was bleeding dark mould on the pavement. My books did not hamper my games, nor in any way alter them except that I could not wear sword and shield hereafter without FitzJames haunting and inspiring me.
[IS A BIT MISSING HERE?]
played as much as ever and walked to Wimbledon more and more. I could also enjoy kinds of fighting where it was impossible to think of poetry. For example, I had a long tussle with a rough after a quarrel during fishing, and was only beaten by the intervention of a third party armed with an old kettle. It was fun, too, to battle at a distance with stones, dodging and casting at the same instant. In one of these combats I got a deep scalp wound made ever more memorable by my aunt fainting at the blood.
While we were at this house my mother presented me with four brothers at intervals of two years, but, as I have no recollection of them during that period beyond the fact that on certain dim occasions in our street or at Swindon one or other was present, I say nothing about them. Being thus seven in family we moved to a large house in one of the roads parallel to the old one [i.e. from Wakehurst to Shelgate Road]. The great long low windowless van that we stamped about in — the bread and cheese eaten anyhow in the confusion — the odd jobs of fetching and carrying — these were pleasures. I am not at all sure now whether I made one of the journeys on the tail of the cart. And yet I am perfectly sure that the name of the elder boy who shared these pleasures was — and that my mother said he was a good boy and had been very useful.
On the first few days after the move I went several times most of the way down from school to the old house before realizing my mistake. Whether I had regrets for it or not, it began almost at once to have a dreamy charm too faint to be describable. It was a visible piece of the past, a skeleton, a hollow shell that did without us. Of course the new house had also a charm. Its size allowed an empty room for us to play in, and a box-room. Perhaps it was not until a little later that the box-room became attractive,
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because it was dark and because in it was a wooden box containing inexhaustible treasures. These were chiefly old books, old magazines, old photographs of unknown people. Many and many a time I took them all out, sometimes in search of something I had noticed among them before and then not troubled about, sometimes in more uncertainty but equal eagerness, at other times with no object save testing the inexhaustible surprises of the box. At intervals of a year or less I must have taken everything out and put it back again, with moments of hastiness when things were moved in armfuls, fully a dozen times. I think I could do it at least once yet. My slender undefined expectations connect the search with that lost book of my earlier childhood about the key of knowledge. But I forbear to amplify this.
One of the discoveries I made was of Pickwick Papers. Sitting in the dust with dusty eyes I read about sticklebacks in the Hampstead Ponds. I could not get on much farther. Too many of the people had ridiculous names. The books had nothing in common with the Waverley novels or the Compleat Angler or Sir Samuel Baker's travels.
At about this time I began to keep my own books on a shelf of their own and to paste numbers inside them as I had seen done with library books: to raise the numbers to a respectable size I took my two next brothers into partnership and we lent them out to one another with formality. The sum of our united ingenuities would at no time have been very great. However, I had my own way. It was usually easy for me to get it. While I was still at the Board-school I was conscious of possessing some power over my physical superiors, though the use of it was unconscious. I cannot say how much it was exerted, if it was at all, by means of wheedling, begging, cringing, or perhaps putting others into the position of feeling brutal or awkward if they refused me. My later days at the Board-school were pleasant enough. My class sat in the same room and was taken by the same master as a special
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small class of the oldest boys in the school. They used to read accounts of the Massacre of Glencoe and produce essays on what they remembered. I made friends with one or two of them, laughed at their jokes and catch-phrases, and was expected to enjoy the picture of the gravid uterus of a rabbit in a book which one of them showed me.
Towards the end of these days I spent the greater part of a summer term in a Board-school in Swindon where the head master was a friend of my father's. I became a Wiltshire boy in accent. I made friends and sweethearts too, and at the Fête in August spent all the day and evening with a girl on each side of me — I do not think I had ever before or since so much pride and confidence. To one of the girls, a dark sturdy beauty named Laura, I was more or less faithful for several years. Though she knew and did nothing that I valued, to have a girl by me on a walk pleased me intensely. I suppose the love of having my own way guided me surely for the most part towards girls who were not flirts.
I liked also elder girls. Some of the most blissful hours I ever spent were in country walks with a buxom Welsh cousin named Florence, who was probably eight or nine years my senior. She was staying at my grandmother's one summer when I was, and she and I used to walk along the quiet road, or over meadows, to Shaw or Lydiard. I thought her beautiful, her rosy face, her voice, herself beautiful. To me she was all sweetness and kindness. We used to go into a farmhouse door or into the milking shed and get milk and perhaps eat a lardy cake. I remember her taking out her purse. Everything about her was somehow sweet and perfect. I suppose I had a sort of happy unfettered adoration for her without knowing it. I never saw her after that summer.
I exchanged the Board-school when I was ten for a private school. Here there were fifty or sixty boys of from ten to seventeen years of age, perhaps half of them boarders. They were the sons of tradesmen, professional men, moderately well-to-do clerks, and men of small
[PB: What/where was this school? St John's Hill School, I think — the first of two private schools he attended before going to secure etrance to Battersea Grammar, then St Paul's.]
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independent means. Only one of them had I known before. He preceded me by a term from the Board-school and at once asserted his superiority by making a fool of me. In the small gravel playground there was a swing consisting of a long board suspended at either end by a pair of chains. A boy at each end could work it up to what seemed to me a terrible height, the prime fear being to jump off backwards from your position just as the board began to swing forward. I took my first ride with this old school-fellow. The bell for lessons rang while we were well up, and he dropped off, leaving me helplessly to wait and watch the school assemble, and pointing me out with malice as well as grins when I at last took my place.
The schoolroom was a large single hall adjacent to the large old brick house where the boarders lived with the head master. The three classes under the head and two assistants all occupied the same room, but faced different ways. In the fourth quarter of the room stood the boarders' more substantial desks, where they kept silkworms and white mice. The boarders predominated in other ways. The familiar life together had given them a style and subject matter of their own. Knowing the masters privately they treated them with open ease and half-concealed amusement. They were pretty faithfully imitated by the day boys. But the head master was of stone. He wore a black gown. So long as he was in the room no sound was to be heard beyond a dismal foot shuffling, a pen dropping, a boy asking a question, a master answering or explaining, the head dictating or clearing his throat. While he was out the hubbub was so general that the assistants could hardly single out a particular one to punish, for if it had a ring-leader it was some spirited bright popular boy whom it would be unpleasant and ruinous to punish. I continued to accumulate information in history and geography, to do harder and harder sums, to copy models of handwriting. I learnt a few Latin declensions and conjugations. With the rest of the school I sat listening to Mr. -
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talking physiology as if the body were a newly discovered machine and we were angels.
Just before the holidays like everyone else I wrote a letter to my dear parents telling them what had been done during the term, when the holidays began and how long they were to last. But I learnt also how to keep silkworms alive, and added to the boarder's pocket-money by buying as many as I could. I had a penny or twopence a week. One of the masters, a black-haired snub-nosed kindly energetic freshman, was fond of me. He chaffed me about the freckles I got in the summer holidays; he gave me the Lamplighter and numbers of Horner's Penny Stories; he came round to see my father and offered to take me to the baths and teach me to swim. I had no particular liking for him or gratitude for his liking for me, and when I left the school I left all but the first of his letters to me unanswered and so tired his attention. I only knew one boarder at all well. He was a Welsh boy from Flint several years older than myself, and wanting to do something to please him, I gave him the leather-bound New Testament which I had received as a prize at the Board-school.
I cannot recall that boarders and day boys had any united or organized games except paper-chases. A paper-chase made one of the Saturdays at this school a great and notable day for me. For I then discovered a piece of country as it seemed to me, exactly like the real country at Swindon and quite unlike the commonland at Wimbledon. Here were private but not inaccessible copses, hedges with oaks in them, and wandering paths, rough lanes, scant cottages. I got left behind and lost the rest of the school except one older boy. We had bread and cheese at the "George Inn". That day I ran, walked and crawled six or seven miles out and the same distance back. For a year it may be I left this piece of country unrevisited. I made several friends among the day boys. One who had a deep voice and must have been much older used to take me out to share his
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adventures on a double 'sociable" tricycle; and he gave me white rats. But I had most to do with a boy only a year or two older than myself, named Jonathan, who introduced me to some of his father's workshops, and particularly the carpenter's shop. Adjoining this shop were roomy houses for pigeons of several kinds, Belgian hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and white rats. Fine afternoons, therefore, had now scarce any advantages over wet ones. Making additions to the cages, cleaning them out, feeding the birds and animals, handling them, selling or exchanging them, talking about them, set the hours rolling lazily, swiftly. In a day or two I had learnt all, alas! that I ever did about the use of saw, hammer, screwdriver, and brace. That is to say I was now a quick unscrupulous maker of cages of all sizes. I fitted doors to them, fronts of split wood and wire-netting, roofs of tarred felt laid upon laths. I spent all the shorter sections of my spare time in making, altering, and mending cages for pigeons, rabbits and white mice.
I retained few of my old school friends. One of them, though he too had moved and in the opposite direction, made several attempts to keep up our friendship. He was a very swift runner and always walked in the middle of the road wearing sandshoes. The short period of separation made me shy when he came to the door on a Saturday afternoon, so that I was almost inclined to deny that I knew him. He must have felt this and at length altogether ceased to come. Before long I was sorry for this.
I must have begun keeping pets soon after entering the new school. Through them, or rather through the pigeons, I got to know other fanciers, men and boys, in the neighbourhood. For example, a pigeon house hung on the wall of a house in the street at right angles to ours and visible a hundred yards away from the back garden where I kept my pets. I used to see the owner, a much older boy called Henry, leaning out of the window to attend to his pigeons or to set them at liberty for a flight. They ascended half a mile high and remained circling for a
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great time, or if they did not and tried to perch they were driven up again with loud clappings. The boy's whistle to his pigeons, a peculiar shrill anxious one, and a mild luring one, I acquired as soon as possible. Still I felt that the boy looked down on me. My birds never flew much higher than the topmost chimneypots, and they used to get lost or caught by cats. One day I was sure that a pigeon of mine had entered his cage and I went round to ask for it. Thus we became acquainted. He began by denying the fact with a mixture of indignation and chaff, and I think he made a small charge before restoring the bird. But I supposing this was the custom or admiring his superior age, skill, and aplomb, was far from complaining. I accepted his patronage gladly. He used to come round for me in the evening with a whistle instead of a knock — not like either of the pigeon calls, but very expressive. He would begin with pairs of notes imperious in tone, and repeated if necessary several times more and more loudly. Then he waited, sauntering backwards and forwards outside. If I did not come out he changed to a more questioning call which had in it a despairing quality or one meant to raise despair in me. It gave me a last chance. Often he had a bird to show me for admiration or for sale. I found it hard ever to refuse anything he praised to me. In my case to acquire a new pigeon was a delight. So in I used to go, if success was at all possible, to tell my father and mother about this supreme opportunity, in short to ask for a shilling or one-and-six. Not too seldom, I succeeded. At times I possessed a dozen of different breeds — athletic homers, heavy wattled antique-looking dragons, dainty almond tumblers, feminine owls. For a few days I rejoiced in a pair of red-ruffed Jacobins sent me from Wales, delicate pretty birds; but they never flew beyond the roof and seldom higher than the fence, where a cat caught first one, then the other. This was one of the few sorrows of pigeon-keeping. The pleasures were innumerable. Chief of all was to set the birds
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free, watch them to the roof, clap till they flew round and round, draw them down by whistling and scattering seed. The mere purchasing of seed out of my pocket-money was a pleasure, especially as I was always experimenting with my own fancifully proportioned mixtures of dari, barley, maize, tares, and peas. Even the four useless eggs laid by a devoted couple of hens were not thrown away on me: I discovered that no young ever came from them, and thereafter I diligently blew every one and treasured them. The great excitement was tempting a stray bird down with the rest into the pigeon house. Only once did I have a stray safely trapped and housed. She was for me a bird of mark, with the name of the Columbusian Society on her wings;i kept her proudly with infinite expectation of her offspring. I was disappointed. For her one pair of fertile eggs I could not leave patiently to hatch. As soon as the young began to make a stir in them I answered them by chipping the shell with a pin; they were pricked and died unborn.
The rabbits were less interesting. But they were possessions. I learnt to handle them in the right manner. It was something to bury one from time to time. Also the business of rabbit-keeping took me to new country. One of our servants had a brother-in-law in Battersea who was a fancier, and I used to go down there to see his animals, and occasionally to buy one. One of the shops in his neighbourhood sold bran or pollard more cheaply. Such were my triumphs. And I remember that once when coming home from a visit to this man I found in my overcoat pocket a sum of money amounting to about a couple of shillings. Probably it was the change from some purchase for my mother which I had forgotten to hand over. It happened a second time. I mention only for the sake of pointing out that after the first surprise at each find I had a feeling of good fortune, mysterious indeed but not puzzling. I believe that I really thought the money had entered my pocket by some unique, magic accident. My companions were now boys exclusively. I
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had no sisters; my girl cousins I saw but two or three times in all my childhood; none of my friends had sisters of their own age; my father and mother had but a few close acquaintances, who rarely came to the house and hardly ever brought their children, boys or girls, with them. Mabel and I had forsaken one another. If we met we smiled without words, without stopping.
Then there were the servants. Usually one general servant shared the work of the house with my mother, everything except the washing. That was done by a woman who came over from Lambeth every week on Mondays. Her great red arms and her clean rapid ways awed me, her glass of beer and plate of bread and cheese in the middle of the morning awed and delighted me. Her rule lasted for many years; the servants rarely stayed more than a year or two. Their names, Eliza, Emily, Jane, Martha, call up individual but indefinite images of the bodies and natures of those girls: Eliza, grey-eyed, round-faced, bustling, laughing; religious Emily, cross-eyed, mild, severe; clever Jane, white, hazel-eyed, pretty but with a large nose and a tendency to a cold; Martha, Irish, blackhaired, always talking or singing her song of The press-gang came for William when he was all alone, but safe and sound, and much missed when she went to Australia. Then there were two sisters, Alice and Clara, who were with us together, and had conspicuous powers as actresses and managers. They were always dressing up themselves or us, to surprise my father, who had no wish to be surprised. Alice, the elder, a tall dark girl, had the supreme gift of being able to step out from the attic window on to the gutter and up on to the roof, and move freely there or look down on us in the garden. These sisters regarded themselves as not exactly servants. That they knew an aged German count whom we used to see about in the streets gave them a sort of glory. Our quiet stiff home could not contain these two very long: even Alice without Clara proved impossible.
For a time we tried mother's
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helps instead of servants. We called them "Miss' Brown and so on. One was a prettyish small thing who once hid herself under my bed and emerged while I was undressing: it made me indignant at first as I always was if taken unawares, but a little vain afterwards because I thought she liked me.
The most exciting was a girl from Hampshire, a rather handsome, tall, bony, and pale girl, a farmer's daughter who had left home after some quarrel. I think she said her father was a gentleman farmer. She talked a lot about horses. At supper she did practically all the talking, and I remember that my father did not much want to be amused when she was telling of the lovers who would get lost in her father's copses on fine evenings. She was a merry creature. She and a pretty friend who came to see her, an actress with soft dark hair and a romantic name, wanted to romp with us and be familiar. But I drew off, suspiciously, feeling that I did not understand them, wishing not to give myself away. I left them alone with my younger brothers, drawing enigmatical figures on paper and asking riddles and laughing both openly and to themselves. If I could not hold my own I would retreat and not be victimized. Miss ____ also did not stay long. I was sorry when she was gone. Nearly all these women I liked in some way. For one thing, they were very patient and kind, while several of them, I can see now, I admired and enjoyed admiring for their sweet looks or language or presence.
The only woman I had anything to do with regularly was my mother, and except at meals and bedtime I did not see much even of my mother. Occasionally we played cards or draughts together in the evenings. My mother played the piano a little; my father sang "Bonny Mary of Argyle" to her accompaniment. No doubt often I went to London with them. For example, I was taken to a pantomime, where the mannish donkey and the clown wreathed in sausages seemed to my memory worth retaining. London made no impression: I simply recall sitting inside a bus and studying the list of fares at the inner end. I suppose I had
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gradually in my own populous and busy neighbourhood become accustomed to something like all that could be seen or heard in London except the river. Even a visit when I was thirteen with only a lesser boy for company left me nothing to recall it by except my pride at making my way to a big shop in Cheapside unaided. I only knew enough to make a dim picture of squalor, rags and blood, when I heard the newspaper boys hoarsely breaking the silence of the cold foggy night with shouts of "Horrible murder in Whitechapel. Another Ripper Murder. Horrible murder."
Of course I continued, more and more often, to accompany my parents to the Unitarian chapel on Sunday. For a time I was a regular attendant because I sang in the choir. The sound of "How lovely are the messengers' was pleasant to me, but it was a curious sensation altogether remote from my games and walks and pigeon-keeping. It was an oasis, the mirage of an oasis, in the chapel desert. Sitting between my father and my mother, I watched now the sad solemn gentle preacher against a background of Faith, Hope, and Charity, now the feathers in the stout lady's hat just in front of us, now the momentarily visible exquisite profile smooth soft cool glowing skin and perfect scarlet lips of her daughter, the bald head of her husband, and now fleetingly the serried multitudes, the spectacled women, the old men, the pale young men, all in suspended animation. Though some of these seemed to me absurd I had never a glimmering of the courage needed to laugh at them. Faith, Hope, and Charity were words which I could perhaps just dissociate from their vulgar uses, but as I knew of no other use the process left them words pure and simple. Perhaps my weariness in chapel was mingled with something which specialists would label as religious. I only know that where people were sad and solemn I was overcome, half-suffocated by the sadness and solemnity. What was read and preached was to me airy nothing. I knew of no virtues except truthfulness, obedience, self-sacrifice, total
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abstinence from alcoholic drinks. Because it was more comfortable than disobedience as a rule I was obedient. I habitually told the truth when I had nothing which I thought could easily be gained by lying. I stole biscuits and sweets from my mother's cupboard and was tearfully penitent when found out. I never wanted to drink ale except when my uncle poured it out for me in a tot. As for self-sacrifice it was mostly incredible. But I liked to please my mother and keep undisturbed the love that was between us. I sometimes did little unexpected kind things out of my tenderness for her, and was always glad to be the one to take up tea for her if she was unwell, and so on, or to help her with the housework when she was left servantless. But with her as with everyone I was deceitful and had dread of being caught doing what I ought not to do. It was a great and frequent dread. For I felt that most things a boy liked doing annoyed some elder or another; that to annoy an elder was the essence of wrong. My solution was to try not to annoy at the same time that I was doing almost as I liked. Deceit and dread increased rapidly.
My mother never attempted to add to the religion of the chapel. On the contrary she roused my indignation at the two conspicuously Christian aunts who had made her childhood in that dark house at Newport miserable. If she or I had taken more trouble I might have been convinced that all religious people were cruel hypocrites. My grandmother was the only influence on the other side. She persuaded me that I should be really good if I knelt down night and morning by my bed and 'said my prayers', and for a short time I did so. It was "Our Father" which I repeated, though it was and has ever remained Greek to me. Once only I tried hard to mean something in prayer. There was to be a treat in the country next day, and as I was going downstairs I turned in to my mother's dark room and, throwing myself down beside the bed with a violence intended to thwart hesitation, doubt, and ridicule, I begged "God" to make it a fine day to-morrow. The day was fine, but I
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