Death and Mr. Pickwick (129 page)

One thing was clear: normal commercial considerations, of damage to reputation, were suspended in relation to
Pickwick
. It did not matter how defamatory the description – to be associated with
The Pickwick Papers
, in any way whatsoever, was the most powerful advertising promotion in the world.

The letter the lawyer drafted was never sent.

*   *   *

In the Ipswich of 1921, I entered the Great White Horse's glass-covered courtyard. There was a trickling fountain, and various hams and cured joints suspended from beams. I found myself passing into a bar, where two gentleman farmers – so they seemed to me – leant, drinking and making comment on two other gentleman farmers playing a good-natured game of billiards. The Boots sat in a little room nearby, a young man obviously employed for a passing resemblance to Sam Weller. A bell within his room started ringing, and he stood, noted which bell, pulled down his jacket and affected a jauntiness in his manner, probably because he could see me watching. He gave me a smile as he left, which would have been a little too familiar in any normal hotel. But then, Boots are becoming fewer and fewer these days, so who can say what is normal? Before the Great War, the services of a Boots were charged as a separate item in a hotel's bill. Not so now. The labours of a Boots today are usually subsumed under the cold and anonymous ‘Attendance'.

At the reception, of course I attempted to stay in Mr Pickwick's room, but it was booked for months ahead. I asked when that room would be available. ‘I'm afraid, sir,' replied the man at the desk, ‘I couldn't fit you in before…' I watched him turn page after page of bookings in the Great White Horse's diary – so many, he might just as well have gone on for ever.

A little later, though, I approached a matronly-breasted maid who pushed a trolley of sheets, and asked her whether I might take a brief look in Mr Pickwick's room.

‘I don't know, sir. I shouldn't.'

‘I am sure I am not the first person you have shown.'

She took my coins and said: ‘Just a minute, mind.'

We proceeded along a corridor that was narrow and intricate, under a sloping ceiling, where Mr Pickwick would have brushed his sides against the walls. The Great White Horse may be a crooked and rambling tavern, but it is not
quite
the maze I had expected: judging from
Pickwick
, its corridors should unwind in every direction, universally bewildering, a place where men could be swallowed up and never seen again. It is not that; though it is certainly true that there are nooks and recesses and passages and concertina-loads of stairs at different stages of expansion and contraction. These features are doubled by the presence of mirrors. After a night of alcoholic indulgence, what a very devilish tune these stairs would play upon a man of poor eyesight, limited memory, and no sense of direction. A man, in short, like Samuel Pickwick – who would turn a corner, see a stairwell in the depths of a mirror, and think himself lost in the Ipswich labyrinth.

At the top, we came to a room called The Pickwick. The maid inserted the key.

There was a four-poster with bright yellow hangings. ‘Here you are, sir – the bed that Mr Pickwick slept in.'

I recreated the scene in my imagination. How many others from all over the world had done the same? I noticed a nightcap with a tassel, hanging from a hook. I grabbed the cap, and put it on.

‘You look like a baby in a bonnet,' said the maid.

‘I'll give you two pounds for this nightcap.'

‘That'll be about the fifteenth I've had to replace this year,' she said, as she took the money.

*   *   *

That afternoon, I went to the Church of St Clement. A tortoiseshell cat played among the gravestones. An old man, passing by, smiled and said: ‘Looking for Sam Weller?'

‘Just a cat here,' I said, smiling back. ‘A cat awaiting its gravy and pie crust.'

‘Don't forget the seasoning,' he smiled, leaning on his stick. ‘Great pity the church isn't in a good way. The bells are silent, you see, because the tower isn't safe.' I could see that the stone was crumbling around the door and windows.

*   *   *

It was with great sadness that, in 1925, I read in the newspaper that the blacking manufacturer, Day and Martin, would soon be wound up, having been absorbed by another company.

So on a wet summer afternoon I found myself in King Street, near the Guildhall. There was a tiny rectangular piece of paper beside a door, in a column of similarly sized, similarly constructed nameplates, which said: ‘Day and Martin Limited'. With a heavy step, and polished shoes, upstairs I went.

I came to an office whose only furniture was a table and a pair of chairs. There were two men in the room, one per chair, inspecting a few bundles of documents. One was a young man with large lips, large glasses, shining cuff links and the air of a newly qualified accountant. The other was an older man, whose name is the only description I care to give.

‘I am Mr Percy Scull,' he said.

I pretended I was looking for work.

‘You will be disappointed,' he replied. ‘This single room is all that is left of Day and Martin. When we close up tonight, Day and Martin will be over.'

My face showed disbelief and despondency. I said that Day and Martin had always been used in my family. ‘My father used to say that even if you were poor, you would still look smart if you had some Day and Martin on your boots.' Laying on the disbelief, I shook my head and mentioned that this was the blacking that Sam Weller used. ‘What has done this?'

An expression of great melancholy came over Mr Scull. ‘I have been the secretary to the company for twenty years,' he said. ‘I would normally be cautious in my remarks, but what does it matter now? The company believed that it was above the normal demands of commerce. It believed itself so well known it did not have to tell the world about itself. Nothing was spent on advertising. The world, little by little, came to ignore Day and Martin.'

Thus, the story that began on a hot summer afternoon in 1770 ended on a wet summer afternoon in 1925.

*   *   *

In the spring of 1930, I stayed at the Bull in Rochester. When I arrived and saw the rows of windows and the old, smoked brick, a peculiar sensation of the nineteenth century stole upon me; although I must also say it was an adulterated sensation, for it was mingled with traces of the present, notably the motor cars in the yard, instead of stagecoaches.

Inside there was a glass office, facing a bull's head on the opposite wall, and a woman cashier. It was my great fortune to be able to stay overnight in Mr Pickwick's room, number seventeen. An ageing chambermaid, who creaked up and down the stairs in a neat black and white outfit, showed me to that room. The staircase twisted upwards exactly as in Seymour's picture, though the wooden banisters had been replaced. I smiled when I saw that the walls of the staircase were adorned with that most Pickwickian item: a warming pan. We entered room seventeen, and the bed boasted a canopy and curtains, and a black and white silk eiderdown.

Once settled in, I wandered around the hotel – the empty ballroom exerted a special fascination. As with the Great White Horse, this location was not as I had expected. My impression from
Pickwick
was that the ballroom was so long it could accommodate all the assembled gentry and officer class of Chatham and Rochester, either on the dance floor or on its crimson benches. In fact the ballroom was quite small. While the chandelier, I noted, was now lit by electric light, not candles. I stepped into the elevated den for the musicians, walked up and down the flight of back stairs, paused at the fireplace, and then entered the small passage where the angry doctor went.

*   *   *

Early next morning, I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. There was no one around – not a maid, not a clerk at the desk. There were, however, sounds of sweeping, cleaning, and unassigned creaks.

I turned the handle of the coffee room and entered, thinking as I did of the bar opposite where the tickets for the ball in
Pickwick
would have been on sale. Inside was an old-fashioned mahogany table and chairs, as well as engravings on the wall, a side table with silver plate, a mantelpiece capped with a sun-and-moon-and-stars clock, and sconces decorated with tinkling glass baubles. I walked to the window, pulled down a slat of the blinds, and looked into the high street, on to the bright morning. The old city was before me, mostly deserted, just waking up.

All this may seem mundane. What happened next was not.

When I looked out, I felt as if – no, that is just cowardice. It was not ‘as if'.

It was akin to the sensation of being watched. That prickling of the neck that someone is behind you. Except this sensation related to someone upstairs. Also, if I try to describe it, I would say it was more like a firm conviction than just a feeling.

What happened was this: at the very moment I pulled down the slat and looked out on the city – my neck is prickling now as I recall it – and this will sound ridiculous and I will be mocked – but I was suddenly aware, even if everyone else thinks it is madness – I say at that moment I
knew
that Winkle and Tupman and Snodgrass and Pickwick were upstairs,
really
upstairs, in their beds. I could have chosen two routes to Winkle's room, nineteen, by the route at the back staircase, leading straight there, or via the internal route, as it was inside Mr Tupman's room, thirteen. Either way, I
would
have seen the shape of Mr Winkle under the bedclothes. I could have called out his name, ‘Winkle … Winkle…' and a faint voice would have said ‘Hallo!' from within the bedclothes. And if I had then said, ‘Someone wishes to see you in the coffee room,' then I could have left, gone to the coffee room again, and he would have jumped out of bed, hastily put on a few articles of clothing and come downstairs. I would have heard the handle turn, and I
know
that as soon as the door opened, there he would be – Mr Winkle in a travelling shawl and dressing gown.

Never before or since have I felt such a sense of
reality.
Perhaps it is because feelings are stirred by
Pickwick
that novels do not usually stir. Many have confessed to feelings of respect for Mr Pickwick, that if you were to meet him, you would show him consideration, and would want to introduce him to friends. I don't know whether any book has ever done such a thing before. Perhaps all this was the cauldron in which my experience happened.

It
was
an experience. The Pickwickians
were
upstairs at the Bull.

If I shake my head now, if I attempt to doubt the experience, then I feel an overwhelming sense of my own insincerity – and I go back in my mind to the moment of pulling down the slat, and the feeling I had then. If a man saw a ghost, or experienced some supernatural or religious manifestation, I believe he would be an altered man; well, I am an altered man. I know what happened. I do not expect to be believed, and so I rarely mention this experience. But I cannot deny it.

Such an event occurred only once, and in that location, and nowhere else. I did try to provoke it again. Later in the morning, I wandered around Rochester, aware all the time of the dominating presence of the castle. It is a fine old ruin, and I walked up its crumbling staircases, and lingered in its dark corners, but no matter how much I concentrated my gaze and screwed up my eyes on the shadows, no matter whether I was near or far from its arches, it did not make me
know
that the Pickwickians were close. I ascended the worn steps of the cathedral, and I heard a tour guide talk of the tragic pilgrimage of St William of Perth, patron saint of the city, but I did not hear –
really hear
– Jingle's chatter. I wandered to the theatre at the far end of the town, just before the road reaches the fields, which had now become a Conservative Club with political posters, and I stood by the porch, wondering if I could hear Jingle there, entering the stage door. But no, nothing. Then I walked to Fort Pitt, near the railway station. I wandered up a hill and down again, across a muddy field, into a meadow, by some trees – nothing again. The Pickwickians had flickered into existence, but briefly. I tell you: it happened.

1932

Some cobbles in a yard, and the arch, are all that survive of the Golden Cross Inn. These are near Duncannon Street. I stepped on the cobbles, I went under the arch. The inns and public houses of
Pickwick
are dying. Over fifty were mentioned in the book; now, no more than a dozen survive. Every time I see a workman wielding a pickaxe on a road in London, I fear he will destroy something precious connected with
Pickwick
and its times. It is not with any pleasure that I shall add to my collection of bricks.

A friend of mine had taken me angling the previous week, and we went to the clubhouse afterwards, where he recorded the statistics of his catch – that is to say, the species of fish and the weight. I turned the pages of the club's book, and it contained nothing but such dull statistics. There was another club book, containing formal minutes of meetings, but there was nothing of wider interest: no humorous remarks, no drawings, no character sketches, no poems – nothing at all comparable to the chronicles of the Houghton Angling Club. Nowadays, when people travel easily by car and by train, and a day's catch can be captured by camera, men do not sit in hotels waiting for the fish to rise, talking to pass the time, and making a chronicle of their remarks.

But still, after the melancholy trip to the remnants of the Golden Cross, I was cheered by a visit to a hotel, where the barman poured my order from a bottle of Seagers Pickwick Cocktail.

19 August 1934. The exact day has to be recorded.

Earlier, in the spring of this year, I gained admission to Shepherd's Bush film studios, by pretending that I was an actor. Open auditions were taking place for the role of Mr Pickwick in a film of
The Pickwick Papers
. The studio was one moving mass of fat men, two hundred would-be Mr Pickwicks, each with a number pinned to his chest, each believing the part was his. I was not so fat in those days – otherwise I would have applied myself.