In spite of their eccentricities they were all quite friendly towards myself personally—though I had to watch my p’s and q’s very carefully when addressing Mary, knowing that, from a habit of authority acquired in Moribundian domestic service, she might ‘take offence’ at the slightest thing.
When the singing and playing was over they all gathered round the fire, which was nearly out. It was this fact which caused what to me was the maddest and most distressing episode of the whole evening. For, instead of fetching coal, Joan walked out of the room and, returning a moment later with a chopper in her hand, proceeded methodically to hack away at her beautiful grand piano, gathering up the splinters and throwing them on the burning coals as firewood!
This was too much for me, and I begged her to desist, using the excuse that I would like to hear some more of her charming music. Flattered, I think, by this request, she willingly ceased to abuse the piano, but showed she had no inkling of my real meaning by at once picking up a beautiful old chair (a priceless antique for which she must have paid I know not what sum) and chopping it to pieces in front of my eyes.
Soon after this, warmed by the cheerful blaze of varnish and wood, I began to feel sleepy, and thought of going to bed. Seeing that this house had every other conceivable modern convenience, I presumed that there was a bathroom, and I asked Mrs. Juggins whether I could have a bath before turning in.
She looked somewhat crestfallen at this, and said, doubtfully, that she would ‘go and see.’ She went out of the room, and returned almost immediately, saying that she was afraid I could not use the bath to-night, as the coal had been put into it, and it was full up.
“The coal!” I exclaimed.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s where we keep the coal.”
I made light of the matter, but Mrs. Juggins evidently felt that she was failing in her duties towards me as her guest. She suggested that one of the neighbours might have a bathroom which I could use. In spite of my protests she insisted that her son should go out with me and see if this was so, and if I could be accommodated.
I went out with Bill and we called next door. But here exactly the same thing happened. The coal had been put into the bath. We then called on the neighbour on the other side, but a summary inspection showed again that the bath had been put to the same extraordinary use. Not willing to be defeated, I think we called—in all—on about a dozen houses that night, all the way down the street, but in each case we met with a similar result.
We had to give in at last, which I was glad enough to do. I made my excuses and went to bed at once, falling into a deep sleep after an unexpectedly exhausting day.
Notes
33. It is perhaps worth reminding the reader that in this chapter and the one following, Hamilton is not himself attacking working-class people, but satirising the stereotyped images the middle and upper classes have of them.
34. ‘Coney Island’: the mostly down-market sea-side amusement area serving New York.
35. ‘Mary Brough-like’: Mary Brough (1863–1934), one of a family of English actors, was a successful comedy actress, particularly in her later years when she was associated with the Aldwych farces, while also ‘making her own’ the part of the mother in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which she played for many years. She also had a distinguished film career. (Information derived from Phyllis Hartnoll, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 1951, p.101.)
36. ‘five pounds a week’: a great deal of money in the 1930s, when an adult miner, for example, might take home less than £2/10s (£2.50) for a week’s work.
CHAPTER XV
I see that in describing that afternoon and evening with the Juggins family I have given a summary, for all practical purposes, of their entire activities, from which they never varied for a single day or in a single direction. I had hoped that when I had been with them some time innumerable interesting conditions and customs would come to light, but I waited in vain.
Every day was monotonously the same. Every morning Mrs. Juggins, having finished her housework in an incredibly short space of time, went off complacently to the cinema: at the same time the elder girl went to her factory, the younger to her latest mistress, and her brother to the Labour Exchange. Mr. Juggins alone was visible in the middle of the day, being in and out all the time for the tools he had left behind. Then, in the evening, they all came in in the same order, and there was enacted a scene similar to the one I have given. Every other evening Mary had left her employment on account of some trifling infringement of the rules she laid down for her employers, and Bill, whilst still telling of the countless jobs open for him to take, continued to scorn the idea so long as he could live on the tax-payers’ money.
The reader will have been able to judge for himself of the apathy, laziness, wilfulness and lack of initiative of this family, but it is not so easy to realize how depressing it is to live for any length of time amongst such people.
The trouble is that they are, and are acknowledged by all Moribundians to be, quite ‘hopeless.’ There is nothing to be done about them.
Oddly enough, in a strange way they are themselves aware of their own defects. This was evidenced by a conversation I had with old Juggins one morning when he had come back for one of his tools. This, of course, was in the early part of my stay, when my reason and spirit still rebelled against the atrocities I was forced daily to witness.
Seeing that the old man was in a good mood and inclined to talk, I ventured to ask him if he did not think it would be better, if it would not make everybody a great deal happier, if he, to begin with, made some strenuous mental effort to remember his tools when he went to work, instead of wasting everybody’s time by forgetting them and coming back for them in this foolish way. Similarly, I suggested that his youngest daughter might be a great deal more settled in her mind, and easier in her manner, if, by an effort of will, she could rid herself of this exasperated sensitiveness towards her employers: while I hinted that his eldest daughter would save a great deal of her money and a great deal of time and effort, if, instead of buying a new grand piano every week to be chopped up as firewood, she took the simple precaution of introducing a coal-scuttle into the sitting-room, and seeing, as a matter of daily routine, that the coal was put into it and not into the bath. Also, with reference to his son, I politely hinted that prolonged idleness could not be good for a young man, and I even threw doubt upon the ethical scrupulousness of living in this way upon the taxpayers’ money.
He listened in a quiet and friendly way to what I had to say, but when I had finished he shook his head sadly and answered me.
“No,” he said. “It’s no good, there’s nothing to be done about us. We’re hopeless. We don’t even try. Things aren’t what they used to be. Why, in my grandfather’s day a man was proud to do a job of work. He was conscientious. He took an interest in it. He respected his employer, and his employer respected him. He got a decent wage and did his best in return. But that’s all changed. You don’t get that nowadays. All we think of to-day is how we can avoid work—how we can scamp a job and get more money for it. There’s not such a thing, any more, as honest pride in a job well done. We’re thoroughly spoiled, that’s what the matter is.
“Look at all these modern luxuries,” he went on, thoroughly warming to his argument. “Look at the wireless, the cheap cinemas, the free insurance, the free holidays, the gas, the electricity, the equipment of all kinds. Compared with his old state the modern working man lives like a king in a palace. But do we appreciate it? Of course we don’t. We don’t even know how to make use of it. We don’t understand beautiful things. If you give us a bathroom we only go and put the coal into it. If you give us beautiful furniture, we only go and break it up. You’ve seen for yourself. We’re hopeless, that’s what we are, plain hopeless, and there’s nothing to be done about us.”
I was surprised at the old man’s fatalism, his attitude of complete resignation towards the existing state of affairs, but I put it down to the
fact that he was, after all, a Moribundian himself, and as such, like all other Moribundians, instinctively aware of the impossibility of any change.
The reader may by now have been thinking that I have contradicted myself over this matter of change—inasmuch as I have already taken pains to describe at least two major changes in Moribundia—two revolutions in fact—the revolution in ‘Modern Science’ and the revolution in ‘Modern Conditions.’ But the fault lies with Moribundia, not with me.
The most perplexing thing of all about Moribundia is that it willingly admits and knows change in the past, while absolutely denying it to the future.
This is simply the fact, and I can no more explain it than I can explain its balloons, its target-nosed women, or any other of its seeming contradictions of natural law.
The reader may, however, be permitted to ask how and why it has come about that, in an ideal, a perfect land, so useless, predatory and wasteful a class should be allowed to exist. This is a difficult question to answer, and my own theory is one that alludes again to this ever-present problem of change.
In my own view these people are allowed to exist as a sort of moral example, a visual and living proof of the danger and absurdity of making any radical change in the social system, of giving any further privileges to, or in any way trying to better the conditions of, the working people.
The reasonable Moribundian has only to observe the results of giving the working people what has been given them already, to see what fools and beasts they have made of themselves, and what worse fools and worse beasts they would undoubtedly make of themselves if they were given more. And so, although he knows his lesson well enough already, he has incessantly in front of his eyes a huge practical example of the disgusting results of change of any sort. To put it another way, this working class is, perhaps, a sort of homœopathic serum injected into the body politic. But I should make it clear that this is only my surmise.
After only three or four days with the Juggins family I was tired of the monotony of their daily existence: after three or four weeks I was bored to distraction. In the long day that I had to myself, I did as much reading as I possibly could, and I went every day to one of the wonderful cinemas that abounded in the district. But nothing seemed to relieve the tedium, and I was looking back wistfully now on my life at the ‘Moribundian’ with Anne as on a paradise from which I had been expelled.
It seemed to be my fate in Moribundia not to know when I was well off, for after I had been about a month with the Juggins’, something happened which made me look upon even my normal life with them as a perfectly happy and desirable mode of existence, and to long to have it given me again.
The blow fell with cruel suddenness one morning on waking in my little room.
Before I opened my eyes I was conscious of a feeling of fever, and an aching in my limbs, also a cramped sensation caused, I thought, through having remained in one position too long.
When I opened my eyes I saw the cause of this, and yet could hardly believe what I saw.
Over my pyjamas, wound sinuously around my torso and arms, binding me closely and painfully to the bed, were enormous chains, heavy as lead and at least two inches thick!
I instinctively and spontaneously struggled to escape, but could not move an inch.
I then realized that I must not get into a panic. I must think this thing out. Was this some preposterous practical joke which had been played upon me, or were the Juggins’ a family of fiends, of macabre torturers of some sort? Who had done this to me?
At last I called out in a pathetic way, but no one answered me. Whereupon I let out such a yell of panic that both Mrs. Juggins and her son, who were on the same landing, burst into my room at the same time.
“What is this?” I cried. “What has happened to me? Have you done this?”
“Good heavens!” said Mrs. Juggins to her son, after a pause in which she had looked at me with pity and dismay. “He’s chained to his bed by rheumatism!”
“What the devil do you mean?” I said, but they only continued to look at me.
“Yess,” said Bill ruefully at last. “There’s no doubt about what it is. He’s chained to his bed by rheumatism.”
I then asked them if they would be good enough to unchain me instantly (rheumatism or not), but they only looked at me as though I were a madman, or speaking in the delirium of fever, and I realized that I must calm down and face the facts—grotesque as they were.
I was sufficiently acquainted with Moribundian diseases and phenomena generally to know that nothing which they would regard as unprecedented had taken place (I had indeed myself seen stranger things): but I had never dreamed that such a thing could happen to me. I had imagined, I suppose, that because I was human I was immune from Moribundian contagion of this sort. The only thing to do now was to find some remedy. I asked Mrs. Juggins to call in a doctor as soon as possible.
The doctor came along during the morning, but, after giving me a brief examination, took the gloomiest view.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “This looks like one of those cases which defy all medical treatment. You may suffer agony for years.”
Angered by the defeatism of the man, I asked him no further questions, and he left me.
All the other doctors I called in told me the same thing, and there began for me a long period of agony and frustration, worse than anything I have ever known. It has been my fate, in this world, to have been in my berth seasick for as long as ten days on an ocean liner; and I once severely fractured my leg and was tied up motionless for eight weeks to that crude and sinister surgical invention—the ‘Balkan Beam.’37 But such experiences, with the awful boredom they entailed, the dreary counting over of every minute and hour, were as nothing compared with this abominable confinement by heavy chains to my bed in a wretched little room in a Moribundian working-class district. Indeed, if I had taken the doctors at their word, and if I had not known that release fairly shortly awaited me—not death, but the Asteradio, being in this case the friend—I think I should have gone mad.
Much as I suffered from the pain of my cramped position and the shoots and stabs of the rheumatism itself, I think I can say it was the boredom which irked me most.
At an early stage I got Mrs. Juggins to fix up a wireless in my room, and I listened in all day to the Moribundian broadcasts. But the pleasure of listening soon palled, and I was thrown back again on myself.
The only thing which remained to me were my books. I could still just manage to read, though I could only do this by getting Mrs. Juggins to place the book in a certain position, inclining my head at a most painful angle, and turning each page by the motion of my little finger.
One day it occurred to me that, since there was no apparent remedy for me, and I had to suffer until Crowmarsh released me, I had better suffer heroically, and try and extract whatever benefit I could from this ironical imprisonment in a world to which I had come expressly for purposes of exploration and observation.
I perceived that the next best thing to seeing things was to read about them, and I made up my mind that, whatever the expenditure of pain and energy, I would methodically devour as much Moribundian literature of all kinds as I could possibly contrive to do in the time left to me. There was no shortage of books, for shortly after my arrival in Moribundia, I had paid my subscription as a member of the Nwotsemaht Library, a highly satisfactory institution which allowed me as many as fifteen books out at the same time, and which, if the member left a deposit (which I had fortunately already done), would send any book on receipt of a postcard.
Looking back on it now, I often think that my illness may have been a blessing in disguise, for in living up to this resolution of mine I read a huge number of books, and acquired a knowledge of Moribundian literature which I could not possibly have acquired in any other way.
At the outset I found that the pain and awkwardness of my attitude in bed were too great for me to read for too long stretches, however willing my spi
rit; but I succeeded in turning even this limitation to advantage. I conceived the excellent idea of committing to memory long passages from the various authors. This I was able to do when I was no longer physically capable of reading ordinarily. I had only to read a sentence, then lie back in a painless position to memorize it, and, when I had got it word perfect, go on to the next sentence and do the same.
Not only did this strenuous effort relieve my tedium, and make each day go by much more quickly than I could ever have hoped for; it enabled me, as I foresaw it would, to bring back with me to this world a collection of authentic passages and excerpts from actual Moribundian authors, correct in every word and phrase, as though I had brought back printed pages from the volumes themselves!
This is a feat of which I think I can be justly proud.
I have already, since my return, put down on paper many of these remembered excerpts, and I propose before very long to publish them all in a separate volume.
I shall probably then have some remarks to make about Moribundian literature, regarded purely as literature. In the meantime, I feel that this book would be incomplete if I did not make some general remarks on the subject, if only in its social and more superficial aspects, and will mark time by doing so in the next chapter—just as I had to mark time chained down on that wretched bed.
Notes
37. “‘Balkan Beam’”: (or Balkan frame) — first used in the Balkans, a framework with weights and pulleys for the suspension, traction and extension of limbs in the treatment of fractures.
CHAPTER XVI
For reasons which I shall be explaining, there was, up to the time I left, no actual censorship of letters in Moribundia, and so there was, seemingly, as great a diversity of style, opinion, and thought in their books up there as there is down here.
Impromptu in Moribundia Page 15