A London Home in the Nineties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  Our new surroundings were splendid for such an ideal. There was an attic at the top of the house for the boys’ own, to set out their train lines, build with their bricks, and romp as they liked. There was a garden to grub in and trees to climb. I didn’t want to make them nervous, and I hope it will be counted to me for righteousness that when I heard a ‘Hullo, mother!’ from the top branches of the fir, or saw a boy walking along the perilous edge of the garden wall, I went indoors to suffer in silence, often muttering to myself Hagar’s ‘Let me not see the child die’.

  Not far away was a pond, containing minnows and sticklebacks, and one afternoon a little figure appeared slung about with every appliance for catching them and a glass jar for bringing them home. ‘I’m going fishing, mother,’ he announced. ‘Won’t you have your tea before you go?’ I asked. ‘No; fishermen do not care to eat.’ The right spirit, I thought.

  Casualties were frequent to both bodies and garments, but nothing serious. Falls downstairs, grazed knees, cut fingers, and bruises were little accounted of. A great triangular tear in knickerbockers would be shown me, with ‘It won-matter, will it, mother? It’ll soon mend, won’t it?’ In such a case as this I found one of my neighbourly visitors extremely useful. ‘Oh, do let me mend it, Mrs. Hughes,’ and of course I hadn’t the heart to refuse her.

  Materials of all kinds were in constant demand for operations in the attic. String, empty bobbins, pieces of wood, bits of cloth, sheets of brown paper—but commonest of all was the query, ‘Have you got a box, mother?’ ‘What size do you want?’ ‘Oh, just a box.’ I have not yet cured myself of hoarding every box that comes to the house.

  Naturally I tried to give the boys some serious teaching, and soon found that very little actual sitting down to it was required. At least on my part. Each boy, after reaching the responsible age of four, was set down to some morning task. But any reasonable outside demand was permitted. Thus, one morning the second boy was a very long time coming home after seeing his father off at the station. ‘Where have you been?’ said I, for he looked rather the worse for wear, although radiant. ‘I been delivering with Payne,’ was the proud reply. Payne was our greengrocer, and the little chap had been staggering to people’s doors with greens and potatoes. I guessed that he had learnt as much in that way as in his ‘lessons’ at home.

  These lessons chiefly consisted in the boys doing something by themselves while I was busy in the kitchen. Results or difficulties were brought to me wherever I happened to be. Drawing of some kind was the basis of nearly everything. Thus for starting reading I had made a packet of cards, drawn an object on each and printed its name below; so the word (as it would look in a book) became familiar long before the separate letters were distinguished. Then it could be copied, and there was the beginning of writing. The transition to real reading was made easy through Mary Wood, who brought something to help me every time she came. Among her gifts were two books of priceless value. The story of Little Black Sambo was read aloud to the boys, soon known by heart, acted in the garden, and then read by themselves—such words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘umbrella’ (impossible to teach on any rational system) being soon recognized in any context. The other book was a little folk’s edition of Alice in Wonderland. By the time that these, and Peter Rabbit, were mastered there was no more anxious bother about reading. I have seen countless books of ‘systems’ for teaching children to read, and have come to the conclusion that the only thing is to give them a book (with some good illustrations) containing a story that they want to know.

  In spite of Mr. Harding’s warning I followed his ideas about the beginnings of arithmetic. With the boys’ assistance I painted red spots on postcards, arranged as on playing-cards, so that a five, a six, a seven, and so on could be quickly intuited. A few of these would be dealt out and added up, such words as twenty, thirty, and forty coming as happily surprising new words. One day the glad news was reported to me in the kitchen, ‘Mother, I’ve got to tenty!’ That was the moment to acquire the new word ‘hundred’.

  Quite another aid to realizing number and size came in an unexpected way. The gift of a very large box of plain bricks gave endless pleasure for building purposes. The well-made pieces of hard wood varied in size from a cubic inch to lengths of ten inches, adapting themselves to being railway lines or men-of-war with rising decks or houses or temples, while the little cubes could pose as people. It was only as I watched the play that I perceived their further value. ‘Hand me a six,’ one busy builder would cry. ‘Can’t find a six, will a four and a two do?’ The actual handling of the different sizes seemed to me valuable, and I encouraged a pride in putting all the bricks in the box before bed, for the mere fitting in had its advantages. The boys are now scattered far and wide, but those bricks are still intact.

  I don’t know whether the love of measurement is common in children, but the boys seemed to have a passion for it, and the eldest enjoyed even angles and the use of a protractor. I told him one day to draw any number of triangles he liked, all shapes and sizes; then to measure the angles in each very carefully and to add the results. I went about my own business, and after a long time came the surprised report: ‘It’s so funny, mother, they all come out the same!’

  Occasionally it was one of the boys who set a problem to me, and I was not always equal to it. One day I was at the sink washing up the tea-things, when the youngest approached with, ‘Mother, who is the Holy Ghost?’ I confess that I temporized: ‘I’m busy just now, darling, but another time.…’ He ran off contented and forgot his difficulty. Another day the middle boy, chancing to be out with me alone, asked me what electricity was. Here I felt on surer ground, and enlarged on the subject at some length, not a little pleased at the silent attention of my audience. I was rewarded with, ‘Oh well, when Dad comes home I’ll ask him, and he’ll splain it properly.’

  Arthur had plenty of explanations to make, for my knowledge of mathematics or engineering was never regarded as reliable. It was the early days of motor-cars, and they were rare enough for us to make a game of counting them on the Great North road; one boy kept a little notebook for recording their numbers. On one grand afternoon we had the bliss of seeing King Edward go by. On another hardly less exciting occasion we saw an aeroplane over our fields for the first time. It used to delight me to see Arthur with one boy on his knee, and the other two hanging on his shoulders, while he drew diagrams and explained what the inside of a locomotive was busy about, what the different wheels of a watch were for, how a motor-car worked, and how a plane managed to get up.

  In the matter of geography I was sketchy, being content with getting the boys to know where important places were, and to be fond of maps. With the aid of picture postcards we got on fairly well. The counties of England and Wales, and the countries of Europe were learnt without trouble by means of puzzles, sensibly made so that each county or country was a separate piece. I would hear, ‘What’s become of Devon P It’s that nice fat one,’ or ‘Find Northampton for me; it’s a long one.’ Rutland was troublesome, in constant danger of being lost.

  As for grammar I was on velvet. When I had books to review there had fallen into my hands The Child’s Picture Gratnmar, a gem by Rosamund Praeger, gloriously illustrated in colour. In most schools there is much agony inflicted on teachers and taught by trying to cope, in junior classes, with case and gender, voice, mood, and tense—many of them things that the English language has wisely thrown off. All that a healthy child needs to know is the business of each part of speech. Now this book depicted them in anthropomorphic style, with comic illustrations and a story, so that they became personal friends of the boys. The page on pronouns showed two boys fighting, while their grown-up nouns were having a rest. They had got confused as to which noun they each represented. In this way the useful slogan was learnt—‘One pronoun, one job’.

  Our literary efforts were neither exalted in style nor improving in tone. The boys certainly delighted in the poems of Elizabeth Turner and of Jane and Ann
Taylor, but not for their moral value. They never tired of the sailor lads of Bristol City, of the Pied Piper, the Jackdaw of Rheims, the Pobble who had no toes, and the Bishop of Rumtifoo. I would hear scraps of these being chanted about the house: ‘Blow your pipe there till you burst’, ‘They were ’educed to one split pea’, ‘Time, my Christian friend.’ Not but what I tried to instil some verses of deeper value. But it was no use; I saw that it was merely ‘filling the kettle with the lid on’, and soon learnt how foolish it is to press lovely poems on young people before they can naturally appreciate them, and thus deprive them of the shock of delight that awaits them later on. It is better never to hear a fine piece of literature at all than to hear it with distaste. However, there was one supreme poem that I couldn’t resist giving the boys—The Ancient Mariner. They enjoyed the mystery and weirdness of the story, and I did not require it to be learnt by heart, but now and again I would hear scraps of it being muttered, such as ‘And every soul, it passed me by, like the whizz of my cross-bow’. Last thing before bedtime I used to ‘read a chapter’ to them. I chose something soporific rather than serious, and it was usually an episode from Uncle Remus, or Rudder Grange, or The Diary of a Pilgrimage, all of which the boys knew well enough to join in with the story here and there. But I tried to make up the deficiency of more solid stuff in another way.

  Unless the weather was absolutely forbidding, every afternoon was spent in a walk. Hadley Woods provided a glorious playground for exploring glades, climbing, jumping, hiding, gathering blackberries, collecting chestnuts, or watching the various kinds of trains going by on the Great Northern. But we had a walk to and from the woods through rather dull streets. The youngest boy was in and out of a mail-cart, and quite content, but the other two were bored on the way out and tired on the way back. So to ease the situation I used to tell stories, on the true Chaucerian model. As may be supposed, I was frequently gravelled for matter. To ‘tell a story’ in an isolated way is difficult when the demand is continual. A verse of Keats came to my mind—‘All lovely tales that we have heard or read, an endless fountain of immortal drink’—I began to explore the various sources of good tales that I knew, and found them indeed endless. To save the bother of selection I assigned a different day to each source: thus, on Mondays I told a Bible story, on Tuesdays a story from English history, on Wednesdays one from Roman history, on Thursdays one from the Iliad or Odyssey, and on Fridays a fairy story or a Norsk legend or a fable from Aesop. Of course I had to enlarge and embroider to make the stories last out. I remember taking the length of Station Road to describe the gorgeous home of the rich young ruler—his horses, his grand dinners, his purple clothes, his apes and peacocks (these last borrowed from Solomon). The boys saw that it was no light thing to give up all these jolly things to go and help among the very grubby poor people that he could see around Jesus. It was after some such story that the middle boy said, ‘What happens to us when we die, mother?’ ‘Nobody knows,’ I replied. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I expect Jesus is keeping it secret, so that we shall have a nice little surprise.’

  I suppose to children there are few things to equal the pleasure of surprise, especially the surprise of an unopened parcel. Christmas was the grand time for this, when every present was put away until the appointed moment. It was a day or two before this feast when the middle boy said to me, ‘I hope you will die on Christmas Day, mother.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘it’s not very likely that I shall, why do you want me to?’ ‘I want to see the blood coming out.’ ‘Oh, but you know people often die without the blood coming out, you can’t rely on it.’ ‘Oh well, then, never mind, don’t bother about it.’

  Of course, the boys had many picture books, and no doubt made up strange stories for themselves from them. Their father arrived one Saturday afternoon with an enormous volume of Hogarth. He had picked it up at a sale and had great trouble in dragging its weight home to the door. It is only when I am in extremely high spirits that I can bear to look at those terrible satires. I was surprised to find how often the youngest boy demanded to have it put on the floor for him, and would apparently revel in it. Idly one day I said, ‘Which picture do you like best?’ He said at once, ‘Oh this one, mother,’ and turned to Hogarth’s realistic depiction of a man being drawn and quartered.

  Homemade picture books provided a useful pastime. I got some blank scrap-books, and the boys pasted into them any odd pictures they could collect. One book was kept for history, another for geography, and another for illustrations of the Bible. All this involved much cutting and messing with gum. The house was never very tidy. One morning a neighbour looked in and expressed astonishment at finding me busily engaged in putting everything to rights. ‘I read in the paper yesterday,’ said I, ‘about a woman who was murdered, and it said that the police found her cupboards and drawers in great disorder. So I thought I had better tidy up a bit, in case I get murdered.’ ‘Don’t you worry,’ said my kindly neighbour, ‘the drawers will all get untidy again before you are murdered.’

  While I was a source of amusement to the people of Barnet, Arthur was a pillar of strength. All sorts of troubles and family difficulties were brought to him, and he never failed to do something or other to help, even if it was only by his calm and sympathetic way of getting to the kernel of the trouble. On one occasion a neighbour’s son had got into disgrace, on another a neighbour’s daughter had been found dead in a pond, on another a husband’s feelings were acutely hurt because his wife (who was known to drink a little in private) had been refused communion. In all these troubles Arthur managed to help in some way. The vicar was a young man, very enthusiastic about introducing high church practices. Some hot-headed protestants became full of righteous indignation, held meetings and ‘exposed’ his carryings-on in the local press. He walked about the street in cassock and biretta, and was accused of wearing a mitre! Arthur said he neither knew nor cared what the vicar chose to put on, but he would not have him hounded by people who seldom, if ever, entered the church. So he attended one of these indignation meetings, and let his fury have full scope. The effect was almost magical, for what Arthur said went. He could never forget the bitterness of the nonconformists in Wales towards the Church schools, and how the children were denied proper equipment and even sufficient coal. ‘If I were on the local council there,’ he would growl, ‘I would get things altered.’ ‘But what could you do,’ I objected, ‘if you were the only churchman there?’ ‘Do? Why, I’d raise hell, and be carried out of every meeting.’

  And indeed the objections to our vicar came entirely from the nonconformists in the parish, who, of course, had no interest in the church, but asserted their right as parishioners to fight for the Lord by stopping Romish practices. It was during this local warfare that Tom came to stay with us, and was all agog to see what the practices were like. ‘D’you call this high?’ he whispered to me in a disgusted tone during the service, ‘In Middlesbrough we should call it low!’

  Tom was a grand companion for the boys, and the youngest sat on his knee whenever possible. When I protested, the little chap maintained that ‘there was nowhere else to sit’. This was in a field, where, as Tom said, there were all the home counties to sit in. In church, of course, he had to behave in more seemly fashion and confine his energies to making a train of the hassocks. Tom had given each boy a new sixpence, and one of them had placed it on the pew for happy contemplation through the sermon. When the bag came round Tom made him put the sixpence in, explaining to the agonized child that it must go in because it had been so openly advertised. I think, however, that another one was soon found.

  Sunday was never a dull day, for we had Arthur at home for walks or games or reading or singing. Moreover, I instituted a ‘Sunday box’, never opened except on Sunday. In this I had gradually accumulated a number of diminutive toys, which could be employed in endless combinations. The only one who loathed Sunday was our Welsh terrier, who used to lie down in limp dejection when he heard the church bell; but he cheered up in the aftern
oon when a long walk over the fields to Cockfosters gave him glorious chances of getting as muddy as he liked.

  We never pressed any religious instruction on the boys, merely answering their questions as sincerely as we could, as they arose. I had always felt the truth of Jean Paul Richter’s remark that children imbibe religion best by noting their parent’s attitude to it—no matter what is taught or preached in church. I sometimes wondered what the boys made of the curious prayers and hymns and sermons, but said nothing. Once when the Athanasian Creed was being intoned I observed the youngest boy following intently with his book. Presently he pulled me down to whisper in my ear, ‘Mother, what awful rubbish this is.’

  The religious occasion that we most enjoyed was the Welsh service at St. Paul’s on the eve of St. David’s Day. Arthur was on the committee for organizing it, and so we always had good reserved seats. The cathedral was packed to overflowing by people who had come up from Wales on purpose for it. The band of the Welsh Guards led the music, and the singing of Hen Wlad Fj Nhadau (which the Dean and Chapter probably thought was a hymn) was the most tremendous thing I have ever heard. The whole service and the sermon were in Welsh, conducted by Welsh clergymen from various parts. But the cathedral vastness needs some management, so the final blessing delivered from the distance of the altar was entrusted to one of the canons, coached up in the Welsh for the occasion. Arthur had been busy over arrangements for this festival when he died—a few days before. I was told that they played the Dead March in Saul.