How Dear Is Life

by Henry Williamson

  “Here we are. The lavatory’s over there.”

  Downham pointed to a table on which a screwed iron frame stood, painted black with florid gold lettering on its cross beam. “That’s the letter book. It will be your job to press copies of the letters each afternoon. Your predecessor, Smithy, did it for the last three years. Now he’s gone to our Shanghai branch, where he’ll live on the fat of the land, and get all the shooting and sailing he wants. We used to go down to the Thames estuary together, duck shooting Ever done any?”

  “Oh yes,” said Phillip, nervous lest he be thought insufficient. “With my cousin, this last winter.”

  “Really? Where?” asked Downham, interested.

  He thought rapidly of what cousin Bertie had told him.

  “Oh, down in the Blackwater estuary, by Goldhanger Creek.”

  “Then you must know the Heybridge Basin! Did you use a punt, or pattens?”

  “No, oh no, I don’t think I did,” stammered Phillip, beginning to feel hot. What were pattens? Or was it patterns? Copies? Bertie had never mentioned them. They must be decoys. “No, we did not use decoys,” he said, feeling himself flush.

  Downham looked at him. “But pattens aren’t decoys! They’re the wooden frames you strap on your boots, to prevent sinking into the mud. Do you know ‘The Sailor’ at Heybridge?”

  “Not by name,” said Phillip, feeling he was floundering. He stared at the concrete floor.

  “‘The Sailor’ is a pub!” retorted Downham, with a laugh. “What did you think of the Basin?”

  All Phillip could think of were the wash-basins in the lavatory of the Voyagers’ Club. He was saved from a reply by someone clumping down the stairs rapidly. An older man, with a brown lean face, and smoking a pipe, looked keenly at him. Then he smiled, held out his hand, and said, “You must be Maddison!”

  Before Phillip could take the hand it was withdrawn as the newcomer began to cough violently. He bent double, shouting “Hell and the Devil!” in intervals of coughing. He stood up, breathed in, took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with a loud trumpet note. “Blast this damned March wind!” A smell of camphorated oil spread in the basement.

  He adjusted his face to a smile again, and said winsomely, “My name is Hollis.” Once more he held out his hand, but pulled it back as he shut his eyes, wavered, and then plunged to an enormous sneeze.

  “Do forgive me,” he lamented, as he wiped his eyes. “I hope I haven’t got this damned ’flu that’s going about. Well, young feller, how are you?” Free at last, he shot out his hand.

  “Very well, thank you, sir,” said Phillip, shaking it.

  “Don’t you go sir’ing me, young feller! I’m Mr. Hollis to you, and Hollis to Downham here. You can sir Mr. Howlett, the branch manager, if you like, as indeed you should. After all, you are only a damned junior!”

  Mr. Hollis smiled in the friendliest way at Phillip. Then his expression changed.

  “Well, there’s work to be done. Someone in this Branch has to do it. Downham will show you your post-book.”

  Phillip knew he was dismissed, and in some elation went sedately up the stairs. He was in time to see the remembered figure of Mr. Howlett entering the door, while the boy in the corner stood up.

  “Ah, Maddison,” said Mr. Howlett, in his soft voice. “Welcome to Wine Vaults Lane!” He held out a soft hand, which did not have the decisive clasp of Downham or the firm grip of Mr. Hollis. He looked most kindly at Phillip.

  “I expect Downham, when he comes upstairs, will show you what to do in a moment,” he said as, puffing his pipe, he walked slowly and quietly up the stairs. They were covered with lead, Phillip noticed through the banister rails when the door above had closed.

  The extremely small boy in the corner was still standing up. He grinned at Phillip, and said, “I’m Edgar.”

  “Hullo, Edgar,” said Phillip, wondering if he should shake hands. He decided he might, as none of the others were there. “You work here, too, Edgar?”

  “I’m the Messenger,” said Edgar, with another grin. On his table was a pile of slit envelopes. His work apparently done, Edgar opened a magazine, arranged a pair of scissors and a bottle of Gloy beside him, and began to cut out a picture of Bombardier Billy Wells.

  “Oh, you take messages, do you, in your spare time?” asked Phillip.

  “Well, sort of, but not exackly, sir,” said Edgar. The ‘sir’ pleased Phillip. “I folds up the renewal notices, see, and sticks up the envelopes and puts on the stamps. And I answers the telephone from Head Office.”

  “You’re a pretty important person here, I can see. Do you box, too?”

  “Yes,” said Edgar, shyly. “Down our club nights. Do you like boxing?”

  “Rather! Though I’m a rabbit. I see you’ve got Jack Johnson, Bombardier Billy Wells, Pat O’Keefe, Jimmy Wilde, Gunner Moir, Gunboat Smith, Carpentier—I have a cousin called Hubert Cakebread, who used to be one of the best boxers at Dulwich College. He is going to teach me one day.”

  “I bet you’re really hot stuff,” said Edgar, admiringly; and Phillip thought it best to leave it at that. Shades of Peter Wallace, and the cowardly self of his young days! Oh, and his wildfowling fib. Be sure your sin will find you out. He felt himself going hot.

  Thus Phillip began City life.

  *

  First impressions of a happy family remained. Neither Mr. Hollis, Mr. Howlett, nor Downham showed any other sides to their characters. The work was easy, though without real interest to Phillip. He did it much as he had worked at school, lacking ambition to get on. His first job after arrival was to enter into the Post Book particulars—date, name, address, subject—of the letters passed to him by Mr. Hollis, after that gentleman, a pair of pince-nez glasses perpetuating a red mark on the bridge of his nose, had taken them out of the envelopes slit by Edgar.

  Remittances of renewal and other premiums were not entered in the Post Book, but in the counterfoils of the Receipt Book, at the time of filling in and signing the receipts and addressing the envelopes. Mr. Hollis kept the cheques and postal orders in his desk; while the addressed envelopes passed from Phillip, in due course, to Edgar in the corner, who placed them in a pile ready for stamping in the afternoon, together with the rest of the outward post. After this, Phillip had to enter up the details in the Stamp Book; finally Edgar took the piles in a wicker tray to the pillar-box on the corner. Phillip was responsible for Edgar’s Stamp Book.

  As the fourteen days of grace for renewal premiums came to an end, there were second notices to be made out, to remind the careless or forgetful that their policies had lapsed. For each notice Phillip made a tick in the record book; later a second tick denoted that the third notice had been sent off. When this final demand for premium had been ignored for a further fortnight, he was instructed by Mr. Hollis to write lapsed against the name in the ledger. There were variations in the manner of recording a dead policy.

  Someone from Billericay wrote to say that he was not continuing. “Ah, one of the marks of a gentleman, Maddison!” said Mr. Hollis, “is that he takes trouble beyond the ordinary. Write WNR against his name—Will Not Renew.”

  Phillip’s other work was making-out policies from proposal forms given him by Downham. This was fairly simple. Most of the policies were for Household Goods in Slated or Tiled Houses, Brick or Stone built. The rate was 2s. per £100 per annum, while the buildings themselves were 1s. 6d. Many of the two-shilling policies were for properties in East London, and were brought in by agents, of which there seemed to be a great number. When they came in, they were seen by Downham, who took their money, often in florins, this being the minimum premium. For each florin received, Downham from the mahogany cups inside one of his drawers took four pennies, the commission due.

  “Hm!” Downham would ejaculate, as the door closed behind Mr. L. Dicks, or Mr. S. Levi, or Mr. N. Moses, or Mr. J. Morris. “Phew! Fiss-an’-sipps! Do they ever eat anything else in Whitechapel?”

  Certainly the cash,
which Phillip had to take every afternoon at half-past three to the Westminster Bank on the other side of the Lane, and pay in with postal orders and cheques, seemed to be saturated with the smell of frying grease. But that was nothing to the whiff he got from Mr. L. Dicks, a saturnine individual with faded yellow teeth and a faded yellow straw-yard with a black band round it greenish with age and London air, one afternoon while he wrote a receipt for him, as he stood by his desk. The whiff was a concentration of stable ammonia, sweat on linen so long unwashed that it smelt black: a whiff coming in rings of invisible smoke every time Mr. L. Dicks moved, his dark clothes seemingly saturated in the vapours of the East End.

  Of all the little agents from the East End the most industrious, as he was the most polite, was Mr. J. Konigswinter. This spare, aloof person would come into the office, almost without visible motion, like a partial animation of frost and bone, and wait quietly until someone spoke to him. Mr. Konigswinter always wore a collar and tie, whether his overcoat was buttoned to the neck or not. Mr. J. Konigswinter, grey-haired, grey-faced, grey-celluloid-collar’d, always raised his straw-yard to Mr. Hollis, and gave a bleak, wintry smile as he did so. He spoke in a very soft voice, he appeared and disappeared soundlessly, leaving without trace after another lift of the straw hat.

  No one spoke of Mr. Konigswinter when he had gone. He left behind no whiff, no echo of personality. Mr. Konigswinter had hundreds of £100 Domestic Goods policies (‘in the event of loss by fire no one item is to be deemed of greater value than £5’) under his agency.

  Not all the agents were seedy, smelly, small, or bleak of face. Some were very splendid people, he thought. One morning a smiling young man with dark hair and dark-brown eyes came in, to be greeted very affably by Mr. Hollis. The young man, obviously rich and high in the social scale by his clothes, was dressed in a brown bowler hat, brown jacket and fawn trousers, with yellow gloves. He carried a clouded cane with a large gold top on it. He talked very politely to Mr. Hollis, smiling a lot. Mr. Hollis was also very polite and smiling; for, as he explained to Phillip when the visitor had gone, that was young Roy Cohen, a broker with an office in Piccadilly, whose father bought up all the old uniforms of the City of London Police Force, as well as many military uniforms. Roy Cohen, declared Mr. Hollis, had come out of his way to the Branch to see him, when he might easily have gone to the Charing Cross Branch, for all that complacent old owl upstairs cared about new business. Mr. Hollis waved a proposal form.

  “Six thousand pounds of stock and utensils in trade in a warehouse in Aldgate! It will be a fairly high rate, but young Roy Cohen told me he only places his insurances with tariff companies. Edgar, get me on to the Guarantee Department of Head Office!”

  The Guarantee Department, Phillip had already learned, was where the ‘risks were spread’, or re-insured with other companies.

  “Yessir!” said Edgar, springing up. Edgar had been snipping with scissors a photograph of Zena Dare, to add to his new spring series of actresses, which was replacing his winter interest in boxers. Edgar went to the private line to Head Office. The handle of the dynamo whirred.

  “I hope his Yiddisher Pappy isn’t on the Black List,” laughed Downham. Phillip thought of the Black Line at his second school, and with head held down, went on with a short-period policy of Merchandise at Bellamy’s Wharf.

  “Guarantee Department on the line, sir.”

  “Thank you, Edgar,” said Mr. Hollis, springing off his stool, and saying as he hurried behind Phillip: “Good God no! Old Moses Cohen’s as honest as the day! He doesn’t need fire to purify spurious figures in his ledgers. Good morning, is that Guarantee? Get me Mr. Ironside, will you, please. Wine Vaults Lane speaking. Hullo, is that you, Ironside? I want to spread a risk, six thousand on contents of Moses Cohen’s clothing factory in Aldgate. Right. My thanks to you!” He hung the receiver on the brass bracket.

  “Yes, young Roy Cohen should bring us some useful business,” he said, smiling at Phillip as he passed his desk again. The smile encouraged Phillip to say,

  “What is a broker, sir?”

  “A broker, my lad, is a superior form of commission agent. Just as an Esquire, so described on a domestic policy, is a superior form of the general description, Gentleman. Now don’t you go and call Mr. Tate, when you make out the policy for the new country house he is building for sixty thousand pounds, a Gentleman. He’s an Esquire. He wouldn’t like it if he found himself among the sort of people, worthy folk as no doubt they are, insured under the agency of Mr. L. Dicks or even of the good grey Konigswinter! If in any doubt, ask me. See?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hollis.”

  Mr. Tate had recently come into the office. He was a beefy man with a very big red face, and a genial, hearty manner. He wore, Phillip noticed, a short vicuna jacket like his own, and with it the shiniest and biggest silk hat he had seen in the Lane so far. Indeed, he had been so impressed by the shininess of the hat of what Mr. Hollis called the Sugar King, that an idea had come to him as exciting as it was tempting: he would buy for himself such a hat when he got his first salary cheque. Why not? It was obviously correct, with vicuna jacket and striped trousers. Mr. Hollis sometimes came into the office so dressed, but with a morning tail-coat; so did Downham. They came through the door seemingly a little faster on these occasions, and certainly looking taller. On the other hand, Mr. Howlett always wore a lounge suit and a bowler, entering slowly, in his usual strolling walk. Mr. Howlett lived in Highgate, where, he told Phillip, were big carp in the ponds near his house. However, none of the fishermen on the banks ever seemed to catch them, he said, with a short laugh.

  “Well you know, it largely depends on the bait, sir,” said Phillip. “If they used aniseed on dough, well kneaded with cotton wool, the carp would not be able to suck it off. I got a fairly big carp like that, one day, in one of my uncle’s ponds in the country.”

  “Where was that, in the Heybridge Basin?” asked Downham, with a laugh.

  “No,” said Phillip. “As a matter’r fact, it was at a place called Brickhill. The ponds there swarm with perch and roach, too. And duck, in season, flight there from the Duke’s moors.”

  Phillip wondered if he could get Uncle Jim Pickering to transfer his insurance policy to the Moon. That would show Downham! Would he be an Esquire? Probably not; all the same, he was a seed merchant, and secretary of the local gas company.

  Out of curiosity, when he was alone for a few minutes, he looked up Hollis’ policy. It was for £300, Household Goods, at a house at Woking in Surrey. Hollis had written it out himself, Harold Fazackerley Hollis, Esquire! There it was, in his galloping writing, with a Waverley nib. Then he looked up Mr. Howlett’s policy. He was for £450 Domestic Goods, and £850 the brick built and slated house. Mr. Howlett was only a Gentleman. Mr. Howlett had also made out his own policy.

  However, Mr. Hollis had a very distinguished father-in-law. Mr. Hollis had told him that he was Carl ton Turnham, the famous civil engineer who had been responsible for the new kind of sewerage plant of a big town in Surrey, a new and epoch-making design. The effluent, said Mr. Hollis, was spread over six hundred acres of specially planted rye-grass. The area was divided so that the grass was fertilised one year, and left for hay the next. The bumper hay crop every year paid most of the urban district council’s sanitary department’s wages. “There’s economy for you, and a useful distribution of waste products!” Phillip was duly impressed.

  Very important men, he learned from Mr. Hollis, had offices in the Lane. They were Household Names in sugar, tea, and coffee. Had he been to see the Cloth Hall? Then he should. The Corn Exchange in Mark Lane, nearby, was worth visiting, too. All the corn that fed London and the barleys that supplied the great breweries passed through a few hands there, in samples only of course, he said. At times Mr. Hollis was almost an enthusiastic as Gran’pa and Mother were, about the City. Fancy preferring that sort of thing to birds and fish! He dared to say so, one day. Mr. Hollis looked at him intently.

  “I yield to n
o one in my love of Outdoors, my young would-be Waterton, but do you realize that in the City, in which you are privileged to earn your bread and butter, nearly three quarters of a million workers run almost the entire country? Think a moment what that means, my lad! Approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand toiling souls—less you and Edgar over there, of course—Edgar, get on with your work!—seriously, Maddison, it is a fact that approximately three-quarters of a million people, all more or less experts in the various branches of commerce, banking, and insurance, arrive in this square mile every morning, and depart again in the afternoon, more rather than less to the suburbs, most of them—again excepting you and Edgar—stop grinning, Edgar!—as I was saying, seriously, Maddison—all joking apart—what the hell are you smirking at?—shipping clerks, insurance men, typists, shop-keepers, bank-clerks, and many other decent and respectable people with inherited skills and techniques of a thousand years—since the Romans left, in fact, and the Danes and Saxons were absorbed, and one of my ancestors, Baron Holies—spelt with an ‘e’ and not an ‘i’, according to the family records—Ah, hullo, Thistlethwaite! And a good day to you, too!”

  Phillip was beginning to recognise many of the regular callers. Mr. Thistlethwaite was one of them. He was a Broker. He always wore a top hat, an old-fashioned frock coat, and new-fashioned dark-pearl button boots with fawn cloth sides. Mr. Thistlethwaite had a very big moustache, which looked as though it had been waxed at one time, but the wax had never been properly washed out. Mr. Thistlethwaite always greeted Mr. Hollis in a loud, hearty voice, which dropped, as though it belonged to a bass-viol, to a gutty sort of grumble as Mr. Thistlethwaite leaned over Mr. Hollis’ desk and recounted his grievance against the Metropolitan Insurance Company, which had dismissed him, for some reason or other, Phillip gathered, with an offer of six months salary as an ex gratia payment. Mr. Thistlethwaite, who had started an agency in Crutched Friars, was going to fight them, he said. What did Hollis think?