by Denton Welch
Suddenly the door flew open and someone fell on the floor in a heap. From the light in the passage I could see that his evening clothes were ‘tousled’, to say the least.
He picked himself up, cursing, and started to chant like a priest; then he went over to the fire, which was burning brightly, and spat into it.
‘Bloody thing’s going out;’ he grumbled, and spying the coal-box, picked it up bodily and threw almost the entire contents on to the flames. The lumps of coal cascaded on to the floor in an avalanche. Spooney woke up and asked, ‘What’s happened?’
Riley became testy and sergeant-majorish. The drunk Old Boy, who was senior to all of us by many years, switched on the light, and staring round said, ‘I don’t know any of you.’
We gathered round the fire and began to pick the coals off and to gather them up from the floor.
‘There’s quite enough on already,’ we explained, and suggested that he should go to bed.
As soon as we had put all the coal back in the scuttle, he picked it up again and threw it on the fire. This happened several times and we were in despair, fearing that the place might catch fire.
At last the drunk fell into bed, but the rest of us did not dare to sleep for some time, in case he should wake and start his tricks again.
In the early hours, I heard Riley tiptoe across to me and say, ‘Let’s go to the bathroom before the others wake up; there’ll be a terrible crush.’
I was most unwilling to do this, but I had to be amiable. ‘Shall I go first,’ I said firmly, ‘or will you?’
This was clearly not his idea, but he appeared to fall in with it. ‘All right, you go first, if you’re quick.’
I got up hastily, taking my clothes with me to the bathroom.
As I stood up in the bath naked (for the water had not yet warmed the cold enamel) I heard the door being tried.
‘Let me in, let me in,’ Riley said, ‘I want to get some water for shaving, while you’re bathing.’
I turned the key reluctantly and jumped back into the bath. He came in, muffled up in his dark camel-hair dressing-gown, and bent over the can as he held it under the tap. Something was going on within him and he would not talk, but seemed to be fuming and fretting. He spent far too long over filling the can and still would not go. At last the situation petered out in complete anticlimax. Something went quite hard and stern and loathing within me. I would not even look at him until he gradually, weakly withdrew from the room.
Then I became quite sorry for poor Riley, who must be hated quite as much, now that he was at Sandhurst, as he had been at Repton.
We all had breakfast that morning at the Bull. It seemed such a small pub to hold so many people. I sat next to someone who I remembered as a dark person with thick red cheeks. The dark hair and the red cheeks were still there, but something had happened to his face. Some dreadful operation had been performed and now there was a huge dent in his forehead and the skin was pulled away from his eye. One of the red cheeks went in instead of out.
It was difficult to eat my breakfast while looking at him; yet I could not look away.
I LEFT MY GRANDFATHER’S HOUSE
In the early summer of 1933 I started out for my first walking tour. I left my grandfather’s house at Henfield in Sussex one evening and walked towards the river. My aunt seemed pleased to be rid of me. She speeded me on my way rather too gaily and quickly.
As I walked, I thought, ‘I’ve really started now, and I don’t know where I am going to sleep tonight.’ I felt excited, but also a little unhappy and alarmed. I wished that I had not started out in the evening.
I had been planning my tour all the weeks that I had walked to and from the art school in the squalid London streets. I thought, ‘I shall get away from all this and wear only a shirt and shorts and not go near anyone for weeks and weeks.’ I had a longing to hide myself in some very isolated place, and I thought immediately of the Lakes. I wanted to go to them; I had never seen them, but I can’t remember what made me finally change my plans and walk to Devonshire instead. It may have been that I knew the way, roughly, in that direction, or it may have been because there were more hostels in the south and west. I had decided to stay in Youth Hostels whenever I could.
When I got to the river banks the sun still seemed high but it was turning orange. I spoke to an old man who was smoking his pipe near the water and asked him if it was Steyning that I could see on the other bank. He said it was and added something that I cannot remember, but I know that it gave me a dismal feeling, a realisation that I was alone, that it was getting late and I had nowhere to sleep.
I came out into the town by the church. I remembered the day when I had drawn one of its Norman arches, and this too, for some reason, added to my gloom. I hurried past the old school and on into the High Street. I saw again what my aunt had said was the mint-house. I thought of coins and counterfeiters. The Georgian front of the hotel and all the other houses made me feel sad. I felt that they were all threatened, that nothing could survive for long. I passed the tea-shop (near the old building with the cupola), where my aunt always bought cakes and soda-bread; I thought of the thick chocolate icing and the walnuts. I almost longed to be back at Whaphams helping to stir the coffee in the machine after supper.
When I reached the end of the town and was on the road to Washington I spoke to another man. I asked him if he knew where I could spend the night. He seemed doubtful; he thought I might find something if I went down the lane to Wiston. He thought that there was a cottage at the end, on the left, where they might take me in.
I turned into the lane, past the old beamed house with the juttingout upper storeys on each side. The light was beginning to fade; a rich blue mist was smeared and wrapped round things. When I got to the cottage I did not dare to ask; I went to the front door, then to the back, and finally left without saying anything. I shut the garden gate as quietly as possible and walked on in the direction of Wiston, feeling a little desperate.
I had seen the great house before, but only in the full daytime and never when I was alone. Now it looked majestic as ever, with all its Elizabethan stonework, but there was something baleful and forbidding about it too. I think that some panes must have been glittering in the last light or that some lurid colour must have caught its chimneys. I know it filled me with disquiet.
I walked up to the courtyard in front and stared at its sulking face. Suddenly its ancientness delighted me. I loved the eighteenth-century sash window stuck carelessly in the Elizabethan stonework. I loved all its crude ornaments. I had the idea from my aunt that the Gorings, who owned it, had let it. I thought that it might be empty and that a good-natured housekeeper might give me a servant’s bedroom when I told her how far I had walked.
Without allowing myself to think too much I strode up to the jutting-out porch and pulled the long iron handbell. The noise, echoing a long way off, frightened me. I was confusing myself with explanations as the footsteps approached. ‘Who’ll it be?’ I thought, and, ‘What shall I say?’
The door opened slowly and a young footman in striped waistcoat and carrying an electric torch stood in front of me. He had dark eyes and dark hair and he stared at me in some surprise.
‘I wonder if you could tell me of anywhere where I could spend the night,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m on a walking tour, and I haven’t found anywhere yet, although I was told of a cottage out in this direction.’ All the time I was willing him to say that he’d go and ask if I could spend the night there.
But he only looked at me quite pleasantly and stupidly and said, ‘There’s nothing out here, I’m afraid. You’ll have to go back to Steyning.’
‘Oh, I can’t do that, I’ve walked too far, I’m very tired,’ I answered.
The man thought for a moment or two.
‘I suppose it wouldn’t be possible for me to put up in some odd corner here, just for the night?’ I suggested in a rush of boldness.
‘No, I don’t think you could do that,’ he sa
id heavily. ‘I’d get into trouble, but I was going to say why not go round to the farm and ask if you can sleep in one of the outhouses? One of them’s got plenty of clean hay in it.’
The suggestion seemed somehow insulting, but I knew it was sensible. I said goodnight and turned away, feeling affronted that I should have to ask for room in an outhouse and not in the great house.
I found the small farm down the lane, and knocked. The farmer looked suspicious and worn-down, as less prosperous ones usually do. I told him what the footman had suggested to me and he took me to the shed. The entire floor was thickly covered in hay, so that the little room seemed like some enormous old box-bed.
I thanked him and he left me after saying a few rather tense, discontented things. I sat down in the hay and started to unpack my rucksack. I could not clean my teeth without water, so I contented myself with rubbing toothpaste along the ridges of my teeth. I realised now how tired I was. I felt two blisters on my heels. I rubbed them with Vaseline, hoping that it might do some good; then I loosened my belt, wrapped myself in my mackintosh and burrowed into the hay. I felt uncomfortable and rather miserable. The hay pricked my face and irritated. ‘I’m really sleeping out, the first time in my life!’ I thought. I felt that the night was going to be very long and dreary.
Someone was standing in the doorway of the shed. I could see his silhouette against what light remained. He came up to me, shone a torch and said, ‘Hullo’. He told me that he was the farmer’s son and that he was sixteen. I told him that I was eighteen and that I was going to walk to Devonshire. He began to ask me a lot of questions about what I did and whether I slept out every night. It embarrassed me a little to talk about art school but I told him about it, because it seemed to interest and impress him. I told him that I’d never slept out before and suggested, jokingly, that he should come out and join me in the hay as I was afraid of ghosts. He was shining the torch up in the air now and I could see his face in the dim light. It was a nice face—rather blunt and strong with a broad nose. He was seriously considering the suggestion; it was an adventure, and he wanted to be nice to me. But at last he said, ‘I’d better not; my old man wouldn’t like it. I’ll stay out here and talk to you a bit though.’
I was torn between wanting to sleep and not wanting to be left alone. I let him ask his questions and teased him a little by making startling remarks and joking with him. I remember him now as a person who was just emerging from his chrysalis; he seemed a little timid, but ready to try everything for himself.
He said goodnight and got up to go. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you in the morning,’ I said. ‘Perhaps. Have a good night. Don’t let the fleas bite.’
He was nice; I liked him.
The night gradually wore away. I was constantly pricked and irritated by the hay. I began to hate it, but it kept me warm. I had troubled dreams about disgusting people, smelling of sweat, and with black, broken finger-nails.
The last time I woke up I saw that it was already light. It was, I think, about a quarter past four. I decided to get up and walk to the top of the Downs, to see the sun rise from Chanctonbury Ring, the Ancient British earthwork, which some eighteenth-century Goring had planted with a ring of trees.
I packed my rucksack, fluffed out the hay and then started to walk up the lane. I decided that it was too early to make any call at the farmhouse. I felt slightly sick and my blisters hurt, but the morning was promising to be wonderful. A thick dew was spread over everything and the number of heavy-laden spangled cobwebs in the ditches fascinated me.
The lane became a path through a field. As I came up to a log of wood I gave a start, for there, lying beside the log, was a creature dressed all in rags so that he looked like a tattered, scaling tree trunk. I looked down on him with a certain amount of horror and fear; I thought he might be dead. When I knew that he was only sleeping I looked at all the details of his appearance. He was old, with a wicked, outcast’s face, and his decayed trilby had been fantastically remodelled into a sort of cone. His head was supported on the rest of his possessions and he lay on his back with his hands and legs thrown out carelessly.
After one last fascinated look I walked on hurriedly. I did not want to wake him. I saw clearly the accumulated horror of waking for such a person. Also, I thought he might threaten me, or beg. ‘To think that he’s been there, so close, all through the night!’ I said. ‘He might have murdered me or stolen all my things.’
I began to climb, past the chalk pit, past the tangle of trees and the first dew pond. I thought of our picnics here as schoolboys, when my brother Paul and Basil Ball from Dartmouth had raced about like mad things.
The steepness of the last part was painful. I caught hold of twigs and trees to pull myself up. At last I stood on the edge of the ring. The trees were soughing mournfully. I looked out across what seemed like all Sussex, and waited. Gradually all the heavy grey was lightened and transmuted into gold. It really was gold, for there was a glint and a flash about everything. I stood looking at it, thinking that I ought to be more impressed by such a wonder. I knew it was wonderful but I could feel very little, except that my teeth were chattering and that I felt sick and empty and lonely.
I went to look through the trees at the heart of the earthwork, then I started out along the other crest of the hill, determining to walk a long way and then dip down for breakfast.
My teeth were still chattering violently. I felt that I should never get warm. In the distance, as I walked along the huge grey hummock of the Downs, I saw what looked like a cottage. I wondered what it could be, so small and so isolated on the windy ridge.
It was a cottage, or rather, the remnant of one. Even at some distance it looked deserted. I could see the broken windows and blackened paintwork. On one side, broken-down walls framed what once had been a garden or small farmyard.
I climbed over one of the gaps and let myself into the cottage. There was still a door to one of the openings; the place where the handle had been was black and smooth and greasy from many hands: The main room had the same disgusting quality about it; the wallpaper was brown with filth and smoke, some of it hung in tatters, and a fungus grew in one corner. I was surprised to see a table in the middle of the room and on it opened tins, a blue sugar bag and cigarette stubs. There were fish bones on the floor, and excrement. Over the mantelpiece someone had scrawled an obscene couplet, in chalk found on the Downs, I supposed. I could not quite make the words out and stood staring at them for some moments; then I was overcome with horror and dislike of the place. I thought of the tramps and vagabonds stopping at the derelict house for one night of their never ending journey. I thought of it when the wind screamed through the sacking nailed over the windows, and when the rotting beams creaked. One day it would all come down, I thought. It would give a sickening lurch and be flat, and I wondered if any tramps would be buried under it.
I climbed through the hole in the wall again and ran away from the cottage at top speed. I had decided to dip down to see Amberley and to buy food for my breakfast there.
Although I had been walking for hours, it was still very early. The morning mist was just beginning to melt as I entered the village. Dew sparkled on the coarse broad leaves in the ditch, and the garden walls seemed crumbling and soft. I walked between the thatched cottages and thought it the most untouched village I had yet seen. Nothing had been painted garish black and white, or given a false look. There was a sort of greenish messy patina over the thatch, the tiles and the creamy walls. I supposed that cars did go down the uneven streets, but at this early hour everything was still. It seemed very much like a village sleeping under a spell.
I found a shop at last, just opened, and bought biscuits, cheese, butter, jam, a tin of cream and tomatoes. With the food in my rucksack I began to feel extremely hungry. I hurried down a street which led to what looked like the ruins of a castle. I decided to picnic at the foot of the ruins. I thought I would try to explore the church, which was nearby, and the castle, after my meal. A li
ttle path led down under the huge wall to the fields where a small stream flowed. I sat down by the stream and started to spread out my food on a corner of my raincoat. I found my tin-opener and opened the cream in readiness; then I began to eat the biscuits and butter and cheese and tomatoes greedily, and after that the biscuits and jam and cream. The rich cream had the sickly tinned flavour but I found it delicious at first.
I lay back on the grass, full and satisfied; then I washed my knife and plate in the stream and got up. I started to walk along the foot of the wall where the cattle had been. It seemed to lead to nowhere, so I retraced my steps and climbed up to the church. I can remember nothing about it except some flower-beds, a notice board, and two old ladies talking at the gate.
I went up to a gate in the farther wall and read that I could look over the castle ruins if I paid a shilling. So I went in and saw that a newish house had been built among the ruins. The outer wall of the castle surrounded it and enclosed the garden on every side except one. I walked round, looking at the fireplaces marooned high up in the walls and at the grim-looking little arches and closets. No one came to claim my shilling, so I walked back into the churchyard. The old ladies were still there.
I set out on my way again, crossing the Arun in a ferry-boat, which seemed medieval and charming enough to me. The sun was shining brilliantly now, and I climbed up to Bury joyfully and looked at the church there. It seemed like a chapel, and I thought it was not old, until I realised that this effect was created by the fact that the whole building was Early English with slender lancet windows. I went in but there was an air of depression about it. I seem to remember grim wooden blocks of unpolished parquet floor, and a baize curtain stamped with fleurs-de-lis and held up by a tarnished brass-lacquered rod.