Even George’s early education, which was poor enough, had had a few
passable things in it; indeed, at the old-fashioned prison-like elementary
school he was taught reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic far more
thoroughly than were the youngsters in the luxurious modern school that
George persuaded the Council to build years later. But there was a drawback
to the thoroughness, for the teacher, a Mr. Rimington, was dull-witted enough
to think history and geography ‘easy’ subjects, and therefore somewhat to be
despised. All George learned of the former was that somebody was a ‘good’
king and somebody else a ‘bad’ one, plus a few scraps of information such as
that Henry the Second never smiled again and that Oliver Cromwell had a wart
on his nose; while geography consisted largely of memorizing ‘what belongs to
England’, and of copying maps—an occupation which Mr. Rimington
approved of because it took so long and kept the class quiet. He was also
dull-witted enough to think that a boy who turned over a page during a
reading lesson without waiting for the order to do so was guilty of a serious
breach of discipline. George had been punished for this once or twice, after
which he hated and feared Mr. Rimington and formed a self-protective habit of
concentrating his attention and disengaging his intelligence whenever he
crossed the school threshold. Not till years afterwards when, as Chairman of
the Browdley Education Committee, he had the task of choosing applicants for
teaching posts, did he realize that Mr. Rimington had made himself thus
terrifying because when he first became a teacher the rougher products of
Browdley homes had terrified HIM.
And now, as the father of the product of another Browdley home, George
turned over in his mind his own childhood memories, not without a certain
nostalgia, but with a resolute determination that Martin’s early life should
contain happier ones. He remembered the crowded house in Mill Street, his
mother’s continual nagging (behind which he had failed to diagnose the
harassed affection that was really there), his father’s doomful voice at home
and from the pulpit; the canal-bank where he sneaked off to play when his
father was at work and his mother was ill (the only time of real freedom he
enjoyed); the elementary school round the corner and Mr. Rimington’s
classroom, with its torn maps and dirty walls, the smell of wet clothes and
steaming water-pipes in winter, and of sweat in summer; the slabs of
dust-laden sunlight into which he so often stared after finishing tasks
adjusted to the speed of the stupidest pupil; terrifying Mr. Rimington
himself, and the not- quite-so-terrifying headmaster, old ‘Daddy’ Simmons,
whose habit, fascinating to all, was to stick his little finger into his ear
and waggle furiously; and the paragraph in the tattered reading-book that
said: “Harrow is one of the great schools of England. Many famous Englishmen
went there when they were boys. Some of them carved their names on the school
desks, and these names can still be read. You must not carve your name on
your school desk, but you can make up your mind to become a famous Englishman
when you grow up…”
George’s own ambitions, even if he should ever become both a member of
Parliament and a Bachelor of Arts, had never permitted themselves to soar as
far as being ‘a famous Englishman’. But for Martin… why not? What obstacles
were there? Surely not boyhood in Browdley, since winning scholarships was no
harder from there than from anywhere else. Perhaps Martin might win such
scholarships—not to Harrow (for George, though he could admire some of
their products as individuals, was of the opinion that public schools
encourage snobbery), but to Oxford—or Cambridge, at least. That faint
preference in favour of Oxford was nothing but a recollection of Gladstone’s
Double-First.
There came a day when Martin seemed old enough to be taken by his father
to the Browdley Town Hall, there to imbibe some vague first impression which
George could hardly seek to clarify at such an early age, but which would
later, he hoped, inspire the lad to an interest in civics, local government,
the history of his country, the parliament of man, and the federation of the
world. (After all, there was no limit to the effects of a child’s first
impression.) So George held the boy lovingly in his arms in front of the
rather bad stained-glass window in the main lobby of the Town Hall—
stained glass depicting a woman carrying some sheaves of wheat in one hand
and what looked like a coffee-grinder in the other (“mechanical power”, it
was supposed to represent); he hoped Martin would at least notice the bright
colours. And in due course the child’s eyes rounded with all the excitement,
nay more than the excitement that George had hoped for, but unfortunately
those eyes were not on the stained glass at all.
George looked down and saw a large rat scampering across the Town Hall
floor.
He was horrified, not only that the child should have seen such a thing,
but that such a thing should exist; it argued bad drains or something—
he would certainly bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Building
Committee.
But Martin was by no means horrified. He knew nothing about rats, but
perhaps he thought that what he had seen was some extremely swift and
fascinating kind of pussy-cat (for pussy-cats WERE known to him), and with
this to wonder about, the visit to the Town Hall did indeed enshrine an
experience.
Martin loved his father less than his mother and perhaps even than Becky,
but George did not mind this, reflecting magnanimously that the balance would
be evened up later on. After all it was a result of the physical contacts of
mother and child, the domestic routine, the humble, seriocomic intimacies;
and Livia made a perfect mother—unexpectedly so, indeed. It was as if
all the nonsense that cropped up so often in her behaviour with adults was
resolved into complete naturalness between herself and Martin; she never
raised her voice to him, or was angry, or even irritated. In an odd way she
gave the appearance of being with the boy in his own world, rather than of
looking into it from hers; perhaps there was a sense in which she had never
grown up herself, or perhaps it was just the animal quality in her that
George had noticed before, that extraordinary paradoxical knack of being
shameless and fastidious at the same time. When George came upon his wife and
child romping together, he sometimes felt that to make them even aware of him
was an intrusion, the breaking of a lovely spell, and he would tiptoe away
rather than do this; for again he was able to fortify himself by thinking
that his own time would come later.
One night, as he sat with a book in his study, the impulse came to write
something that might, if anything untimely should happen, be a help to the
boy or at least a reminder that a man had once existed who had dreamed things
about him and hoped things for him; and in this mood, rare because of its
slightly melancholy flavour, George wrote:
“Everything depends on childhood, Martin, and if you ever have children of
your own, remember that, just as I, remembering my childhood, intend to make
yours good to remember. When I was a boy of seven my parents died and I went
to live with an uncle who kept a newspaper and stationery shop in Shawgate,
and living in his house gave me, I think, the germ of all my later interest
in printed things—perhaps even in politics too, because it so happened
that at the time of my arrival there was an election in progress, and Uncle
Joe, who was a Liberal (the only thing he had in common with my father), sent
me out to distribute hand-bills. All I had to do was to walk about Browdley
slipping them under doors and through letter-boxes, yet I don’t think the
world was or ever could be more wonderful to me than during those few weeks.
I kept hearing about some mysterious person called the Candidate, who was
opposed in some mysterious way to another person who was called the Other
Candidate, and it seemed to me that the great battle of Good and Evil was
being fought in the streets of this town, and that I and my uncle were
soldiers fighting it. I suppose it was then, before I really knew what things
were all about, that I had the first hankering that made me later decide to
go on fighting the same sort of battle when I grew up. And if that’s a
strange reason for a young man to enter politics, then perhaps it isn’t the
real reason, but just the flick of a button in the signal-cabin that can send
a train to any one of a hundred different places.
“But of course all that was years ago—and in another age, because
1914 was really the end of an age. It was not only that things happened
differently before then—they happened to people who FELT them
differently. Take chapel-going, for instance. If you had walked up Mill
Street almost any Sunday forty years ago, you would have seen from the
notice-board outside that William Boswell was to preach there. That man was
my father. It would be a cold, raw night, maybe, with mist peeling off the
moors, but the folk who wanted to hear him were hard-wearing stuff; in twos
and threes they mustered, till by six o’clock the little gas-lit pitch-pine
interior was almost full. Punctually on the hour old Jack Slater went to the
pedal harmonium (the Methodists of the sect my father belonged to did not
believe in pipe-organs) and let his fingers wander over the keys according to
a style of his own, beginning softly and working up to a great roar, his feet
pounding as if he were bicycling uphill to save a life. By this time my
father had emerged from the side vestry, Bible in hand, and climbed the steps
to the pulpit, where he prayed standing (for the sect did not believe in
kneeling or stooping), and announced the opening hymn in the boomingest voice
I ever heard. He was a fine-looking man, as you can judge from the photograph
in my study; his hands were big and thick-fingered; his hair, black and
bushy, crowned a well- shaped head set firmly on broad shoulders. He never
drank, smoked, played cards, went to Browdley’s one theatre (there were no
cinemas in those days), or read a novel or a Sunday newspaper. A life that
might have seemed, to an outsider, full of hardships relieved only by
boredoms, had somehow or other produced in him an air of sombre majesty that
I could never come to terms with, and I don’t think my mother ever could
either. We lived at Number Twenty-Four, a four- roomed house identical with
eleven on one side of it and thirty-two on the other. Parallel with Mill
Street stood Jenny Street and Nathaniel Street, composed of houses exactly
similar. From the pavement one entered by a single step through the usually
unlatched front door; at the back, however, there was an exit through the
kitchen into a small paved yard where coal was stored and clothes were hung
to dry. I suppose there was no labour-saving device in general use in those
days except the Singer sewing machine that, surmounted by a plant pot with or
without a plant in it, stood behind the lace curtains in nearly every front
window. And there was gas-light downstairs, but not upstairs; and sanitation
had but recently progressed in Browdley from the stinking midden to the
back-to-back water-privy. There were no bathrooms, and baths were taken once
a week by heating pans of water over the kitchen fire. I give you all these
details because I hope by the time you grow up most of them will be a bit
historical—at any rate I hope Mill Street won’t be in existence for you
to verify. Mind you, these houses were not slums (as they are today), but
typical dwellings of respectable working folk such as my parents were.
Respectability even imposed a toll of extra labour, for it was a sort of
ritual to wash and scrub the street-pavement from the front door to the kerb,
a task undone by the next passer-by or the next rain-shower. When my mother
was ill, as she often was during the last years of her life, this necessary
tribute to tribal gods was made on her behalf by an obliging neighbour,
though I doubt if my mother would have cared much if it hadn’t been. She was
a merry little woman with an independent mind uncoupled with any
determination to stake out a claim for itself; this made her easy to get on
with and rather hopeless to rely on. My father only saw her between six and
ten in the evenings (the rest of the time he was either at work or asleep),
and during the annual holiday which they took together, always at Blackpool,
the strain of trying to seem familiar to a man whose life was so separate
from hers made her almost glad when the week was over and she could return to
the far more familiar routine of Mill Street. She loved my father well
enough, but the emotion of being in love had probably not survived courtship,
and by her thirties, with an already numerous family to look after, she had
worn her life of household drudgery into an almost comfortable groove. Every
morning in the bedroom overlooking the backs of the houses in Nathaniel
Street, the alarm-clock rang at five-fifteen; without a word my mother would
get up, come downstairs in her nightdress, and poke up the kitchen fire that
had been banked with small coal overnight. Then she would fill the kettle to
make tea, and by the time this was ready my father would be down himself,
washing at the kitchen sink and ready to leave as soon as the clock- hand
approached the half-hour. He was never exactly bad-tempered, but the fact
that they were both sleepy made them reluctant to talk; there was, anyhow,
nothing much to talk about. A few minutes after he had left the house the
whole town resounded with the crescendo of the mill ‘buzzer ‘, but by that
time my mother was back in the warm bed, content to doze again while the
clogged footsteps rang along the pavement outside. To her this pause between
my father’s departure for work and the beginning of her own was the
pleasantest time of the day—and the only time she was really alone. By
eight o’clock she was dressed and downstairs, glancing at the morning paper,
making more tea and frying a rasher of bacon for herself. Then came
attendance on us children, getting us off to school when we were old enough,
and after that a routine of house-work and the morning walk along Mill Street
to the shop at the corner where nearly everything could be bought, from
feeding- bottles to flypapers. She would chat there to Mr. and Mrs.
Molesworth while they served her; she liked a joke and an exchange of gossip,
and often, if the jokes and the gossip were good enough, she would stay
talking and laughing until other customers joined in, so that the shop became
a sort of neighbourhood club for housewives.