§3
Meanwhile my ‘home’ conditions, although better than the Kensington boarding-house, were not ideal. By a stroke of luck an old Cambridge friend of mine, Miss Rogers, got a post at the Baker Street High School just as I began at Bedford College, so that we were to be working within a stone’s-throw of one another, and agreed to take rooms together. We had a bedroom each and shared a tiny sitting-room. This was fit for meals but nothing else, for the table was too small to work at, in view of the vast piles of history exercise-books that Miss Rogers brought home to correct. And we had a running accompaniment to all our activities from the adjoining house—a voice that kept up an obbligato of ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’. It sounded like a small boy, but why was he not in school? Illness could not have kept him at home, for obviously he was in rude health. We never solved the mystery, and he never changed his tune. For me, owing to my previous training with the music students, ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ became merely blended with the ugly furniture, but poor Miss Rogers was driven to her bedroom.
Our meals still give me a shiver in retrospect, for they were nearly always cold mutton. The little joint was hot on Sunday, and then lasted through the week. Once we asked to have it warmed up, but the charge for gravy was so excessive that we couldn’t or wouldn’t afford a repetition. I have great sympathy with Rhodes, who is said to have attributed his success in life to cold mutton. He suffered so much from it as a child that he determined to make himself rich enough never to have to eat it again. To us, life-savers came occasionally from our homes in the west—Devon and Cornwall—in the blessed shape of eggs, butter, cream, jam, fruits, buns, and pasties. Among these a bottle of pickles from Cornwall stands out pre-eminent, for it enabled us to swallow more mouthfuls of that cold mutton. One day some eggs arrived in a smashed condition, and we asked to have them made into a custard. It was a splendid affair, and we ate in rapture, but checked our appetites so as to keep half for the next day. What was our chagrin to learn from the dastard lips of our landlady that she had ‘put it away’. We knew the dreadful significance of this phrase, and although Miss Rogers let loose a good rush of winged words, we both knew that they could not recall our custard, which had gone into the great beyond.
One day Miss Rogers came in with the exciting news that a grand building had been opened quite near, called the Ladies’ Residential Chambers. We hurried off to see it and make inquiries, full of rosy visions of being free of landladies for ever, and able to eat our rice-pudding under our own fig-tree. We found a dignified Lady Superintendent, who informed us that every applicant must have references and must agree to certain regulations, of which the chief seemed to be that no nail must be driven into the walls. There was a flat available on the top floor, containing two rooms and a third little place, half kitchen, half scullery. One bathroom, charged extra, had to serve all the flats on one floor. There were six stories and no hit. Well, it seemed to us the promised land, and we spent all our spare time figuring out the cost. The rent was high and we had no furniture, but we reckoned that in the long run we should spend less than in our lodgings, and get infinitely more comfort. And I reflected that any furniture I bought would come in useful when I was married. How we enjoyed prowling round the little back streets in search of bargains—chairs, a gaunt table ‘salvaged’ from a fire, and a rickety writing-desk that Mary Wood called the ‘demon bureau’ on account of its hideous appearance. It deserved the name from its many drawers, into which I put things and lost them, often shaking the whole concern into its component parts in frantic efforts to find them. One looking-glass we bought was so vile that it discouraged vanity. Nothing will destroy this bit of our furniture, and it hangs in my kitchen today, the hero of a hundred moves. Some of my brother Charles’s pictures enlivened my walls, and Dym sent me a pound to spend on curtains. Meals gave us no trouble, for a good dinner was served in the common dining-room, lunch was either a picnic affair at home or else taken at a tea-shop, and our gas-ring was enough for breakfast requirements. This we used to eat together in the ‘kitchen’. We shared the labour thus: Miss Rogers ‘laid’ the eggs overnight, and I cooked them in the morning. If we both chanced to be in at lunch time we unbent over a game of halma. There was no time or brain-vitality for chess, but just enough for halma. We became so adept at this foolish game that the one who had first move was sure to win.
The evening dinner was always a pleasant interlude, for we met a variety of interesting women, all of them at work of some kind—artists, authors, political workers, and so on. There was one artist with whom I became specially friendly owing to our common interest in early Italian art. She persuaded me to make copies of details from the pictures in the National Gallery, since it would teach me more than any amount of reading about the painters. She thought Ruskin was all very well, but you could have too much of him. I have never been grateful enough to her for these talks at dinner. Once or twice a week I used to go to the Gallery and make little sketches as I stood, and soon came to know the various schools, the painters’ styles, and the individual pictures. I used to take my efforts down to dinner to show Miss Harwood, and she would criticize splendidly, sometimes praising and sometimes saying, ‘No. That won’t do. You can do much better than that.’ I think she suffered more than most people from ugly sights and stupid companions; she told me how some visitor would remark on leaving that she had had a pleasant time, ‘Little thinking,’ added Miss Harwood, ‘that I was exhausted; such people are blood-suckers.’ I am not so sensitive myself, but often enough feel that people take more out of one than they give.
Sitting next me at dinner one evening was an influential member of the staff of the Baker Street High School, and as she chatted she said:
‘I hear that you share a flat with our Miss Rogers…. I wonder whether you could induce her to be a little less conscientious?’
‘I’ve tried often enough,’ I said, laughing, ‘to persuade her that the girls never dream of reading all the long red-ink comments that she makes on their exercise-books. But surely there has been no actual complaint about it?’
‘Oh, no. But the other day I overheard a group of children in the cloakroom. “What’s the next lesson?” asked one. “Baiting Rogy,” was the reply. By some discreet detective work I discovered that these little demons manage to spend a large part of the lesson in arguing about the marks: “Please may I have a mark for this?” or more effective still, “Please you have given me a mark too much.” And although poor Miss Rogers gets flustered and annoyed at the waste of time, she attends to each plea as though she were a High Court Judge. No wonder they enjoy it!’
I hadn’t the heart to pass this on to Miss Rogers, but I told it (properly disguised) to my students, as a warning of what an enlargement of the conscience might produce. Providence had endowed this friend of mine, I told them, with a mind full of splendid stuff, ‘instead of which’ she spent her evenings in paltry corrections, when she might have gone to a theatre or been for a country walk, and come next morning all fresh and jolly to give a rousing review of the Civil War, or what not, that would correct their historical faults at a blow; and what mattered spelling faults? Such trifles any sensible teacher ought to put right politely as she goes.
I used to tempt Miss Rogers to a theatre as often as I could, and several times we went to the Court Theatre in grand style, for a cousin of hers owned it and used to send us tickets for the stalls. We could stay out till any hour, for although the main door was locked at eleven, each tenant had a latch-key. Miss Rogers had a nasty trick of asking me suddenly, at some poignant moment of the play, ‘Did you remember to bring the key?’ I determined to cure her of this by a bit of strategy; pretending to hunt through all my pockets in desperate anxiety, I looked at her in dismay, and wondered where on earth we could go for the night. When she had suffered enough I told her that I should repeat this performance every time she so much as mentioned the key in future.
What with our work and our recreations we led a happy life together, but I
felt it rather unfair that I should have so many more of life’s good things than she had. For by this time Arthur had been ‘called’ and had taken the plunge of coming to London to start his legal career. So once a week at least we used to meet and go for a long country walk or prowl about the unfrequented historical bits of the City or visit some picture gallery; and on Sunday we went to the morning service at the Temple, to enjoy good music and an extremely learned sermon. All the little contretemps of the week were blown away during these outings.
Epping Forest was one of our favourite haunts, and with some difficulty we discovered the old cottage, Little Monkhams, in which I had been born. It stood among the trees, within a few hundred yards of the railway near Buckhurst Hill Station, where my father used to start for the City every morning. It is still standing as I write today, but is not long for this world, for new houses of the ‘Monkhams Estate’, with all modern conveniences, are creeping up to it.
Arthur had taken temporary lodgings in Great Coram Street, sinister in sound and appearance. I do not care to let my fancy roam over his diet during this period. He told me that an aggressively successful barrister said to him one day, ‘Ah, Hughes, what do you do, ah, about lunch?’ ‘Oh, that’s simple enough,’ replied Arthur, ‘if I have any money I have lunch, and if not I don’t.’
His first case in Court was an excitement for both of us. I had a telegram with the single word ‘Won’, and on the following evening went with him and his solicitor to the pantomime. The choice of entertainment lay with the solicitor who bought the seats, and we managed to conceal our boredom through the whole show—transformation scene, clown-tricks, and everything.
Soon after this he managed to get quarters in Gray’s Inn, some delightful old oak-panelled rooms in Field Court, in a building subsequently pulled down. Indeed it was in a shaky condition even then. But how lovely the flavour of the rooms and how easily they were comfortably furnished with two deep basket chairs, a second-hand table, and two of Charles’s pictures on the walls. And the big windows looked out on Gray’s Inn Gardens, with the cawing of rooks and memories of Bacon. Arthur was ‘done for’ by his laundress, Mrs. Keyes, one of the most lovable women I have ever met. Rosy-cheeked, of uncertain age, invariably bonneted, she appeared to rejoice in her work, which was mostly confined to cooking breakfast on a small gas-stove, and tidying up generally. I asked Arthur why she was called a ‘laundress’, and he said that the usually accepted theory was that laundresses were so called because they never washed anything. What she enjoyed most was the arrival of visitors. And of these there was no lack. The brothers of the family, ‘the boys’ as I always called them, were the most frequent visitors. The parson brother, Llewelyn, used to like an excuse to run up to town to see that the bishops were doing their duty at some Assembly or other. The doctor brother, Alfred, was now professor of anatomy at Cardiff, and very well off, and couldn’t keep away from London for long. My own brothers, Tom and Dym, were equally bitten with the love of the old town, and could always be sure of a hearty welcome and a shake-down in the ample rooms in Field Court. Of course no casual visitor ever invaded Arthur’s sacred room in the Temple, complete with law-books and clerk.
In the spring of ’93 the best visitor of all arrived. My sailor brother Barnholt had three weeks’ leave. This he parcelled out between us. Dym met him at Plymouth and kept him for the first week, then he went to Tom in Yorkshire for the second week, and the last week he spent in Gray’s Inn. Tom and Dym stole a week-end from their work to run up to town, anxious to have every possible moment with their favourite brother. I used to go over to tea, to ‘pour out’ for them all, and enjoy the endless talk, and be chaffed and teased as in the old days at home in Canonbury. Two or three times Barnholt ventured to the Ladies’ Residential Chambers, to see that I was all right. He was a bit overawed by Miss Rogers, who was extremely large, and he insisted on giving her what she called the brevet title of Mrs. Rogers. She took the liveliest interest in all the boys, and especially in Arthur. As for herself, she had a most charming mother who used to come to see us now and again, but of love-story she had none. She told me that at the age of sixteen she looked in her mirror and said, ‘You are very plain; make up your mind once for all that no one will ever want to marry you.’ There seemed to me more heroism and pathos in this than in lots of novels, for instead of being soured by her unattractive appearance she was full of wit and humour and warm-heartedness. She was fond of what she called the ‘three-volume’ story of the Devon maiden: ‘the first time she married was because she was young and silly-like; the second time she married it was for cows and sich; but the third time she married it was for pure, pure lov.’
During the few hours that Barnholt spent in Gray’s Inn when Arthur and the others were not there, he was fully entertained by Mrs. Keyes. She dusted the room over and over again while he regaled her with yarns of dreadful storms ‘round the Horn’ in a sailing vessel, with the sailors on their knees in despair. And she had quite as harrowing disclosures to make of horrors in Gray’s Inn.
‘Down below ’ere, Sir, in these ’ere very buildings, there’s corpses.’
She had been during one spell of her lurid career a kitchen-hand in a London restaurant, and had seen things.
‘Don’t you never eat in no restaurant, Sir. Me and Keyes could tell you things…what they does to make the vegetables green! and the thick soup! Ah!’
The dear soul broke down with genuine grief when the news came, some two months later, of Barnholt’s death in South America.
III. America Calling
THE long vacation of ’93 was close at hand, and Cornwall in my mind’s eye, when I had a surprise. I had been selected to represent Bedford College at Chicago. The ‘World’s Fair’ was being held there, a huge exhibition of everything, outshining our London ‘Fisheries’, Naval Exhibition, and such-like. In connexion with it, as a kind of serious sideshow, was a big Educational Conference. My duties were to be simple, merely to attend any meetings that seemed useful, to read at one of them a paper by Mrs. Bryant, and to write a report when I returned. Expenses were to be paid, and there was nothing to prevent my going. My natural advisers, Arthur, Dym, and Tony, were all for my seizing such a chance. They had all travelled abroad and knew the value of seeing strange places, and I had seen nothing more foreign than Wales and Cornwall; and as for a sea voyage, the only steamboat I had experienced was a penny paddle-boat on the Thames.
The eight of us who had been chosen from various schools and colleges met at a house in Gower Street, to be introduced to each other and to receive final instructions and books of tickets from Mrs. Henry Fawcett. For travel on board ship she told us that the most useful thing was a hold-all, about a foot and a half square, made of brown holland, and endowed with pockets of different sizes, to contain slippers, brush and comb, handkerchiefs, and so on. It could be rolled up with a strap, and made to carry odds and ends. With this and a cabin-trunk we should be complete. I bought the cabin-trunk with comparative ease, but spent several feverish hours of the short time left in concocting, with the help of Miss Rogers, this confounded hold-all. It caused Arthur much amusement, but beyond this it had no advantages. Seldom was anything in its right pocket, no article was really held and the whole contraption (intended to be hung by tapes in the cabin) was never within reach when wanted.
Arthur arranged a pleasant treat for the evening before I was to start, a concert at the Albert Hall, to hear Patti (her ‘positively last appearance’). London was gay with flags and flowers and illuminations, to celebrate the royal wedding, and the initials G and M were everywhere. All I remember of the concert was the glorious voice of Patti, and the thrill that ran through the audience at her encore when the first notes of ‘Home Sweet Home’ reached us. I can still hear the long-drawn beauty of the word ‘home’ as she filled the vast hall with it, and the thunder of applause when the song closed.
The following evening Arthur came to put me and my belongings on a cab and see me off by the n
ight train for Liverpool. ‘I’ve put in my pocket,’ said he, ‘a small flask of brandy for you to put in that hold-all, because you never know.’ Trying to be funny at Euston I asked an official which was the platform for New York. ‘Number 15. Change at Liverpool’ was the reply immediately snapped out at me. Arthur was full of anxieties and final instructions, and it was not until the train was gathering speed that I realized that he had forgotten to give me his flask. On arrival at Liverpool I fell in with the three educational delegates who were to travel with me. No city is at its best at six o’clock in the morning, and after a prowl round the streets until it was possible to get an hotel breakfast, we felt that we had sucked the pleasures of Liverpool dry, and were glad to go aboard.
Our boat was the Adriatic, never one of the latest type of ocean greyhound, I imagine, and now nearing its age for retirement. But to me it seemed both spacious and amusing. We were travelling second class and had a cabin between the four of us, and much happy time was consumed in arranging our luggage and exploring the vessel. Why this awkward wooden bar at the entrance to our cabin I asked, why little holders for the glasses, how do I get up into my berth, do we all wash out of this basin? As soon as we started all other interests were sunk in the delight of watching the sea, but towards late afternoon I began to be what Jane Austen calls ‘a little disordered’, climbed up to my top berth, and didn’t feel like climbing down again.
That was the first day. We were told that the voyage would take ten days, but they seemed like a hundred. I envied my companions who were able to get up, have meals, go on deck, and apparently enjoy themselves, and I sucked what amusement I could from watching their oddities. One slept extremely well and snored unfailingly. Another was of a literary turn and begged us not to gaze on her Dianic form while she washed. The third seemed to have an obsession about her belongings and was always rearranging her luggage. When they had gone up on deck I had the cabin to myself for the bulk of the day. It was then that I suffered from claustrophobia, in addition to my nausea. The top of our cabin was only about a foot above my head—quite bearable at night, but incredibly oppressive all day long. After a struggle down for a wash, up again I would climb, and get some distraction from ‘noises without’. These consisted chiefly of the sounds of people hurrying to and fro, and I guessed that we must be between the dining-room and the kitchen, for amid the medley of shouting, snatches of popular songs, and the clash of washing-up, I discerned orders for food: ‘Irish stew for a lady’ (was this a small portion?) ‘Dry ’ash four times.’ I tried to picture what dry ’ash could possibly be, but am ignorant to this day; Arthur saw it on a restaurant menu some months later, and ordered it so that he might tell me, but said that he would rather not refer to the subject again. At night the sound of scrubbing predominated, except during one period of the voyage when the fog-horn drowned all music but its own. I rather liked this, for it suggested the possibility of a collision when the roof of the cabin might be broken. The stewardess was a cheerful body who said ‘Yus’ to everything, and I suppose she must have brought me something to swallow now and again. She assured me that I should be well by Wednesday, because people always were. Wednesday came and went, and I still lay there thinking of the riddle of my childhood that compared the Adriatic to a dry attic. I thought too of the rich man’s reply to his steward’s ‘What can I fetch you, Sir?’—‘Fetch me an island.’ I could raise a laugh over this, for I remembered from geography lessons that the good old Atlantic was five miles deep.
A London Home in the Nineties Page 4