by Denton Welch
I left the place as soon as possible and in walking up the hill outside I heard someone on a balcony say, ‘How can anyone think that’s pleasure? When I go on holiday I want to enjoy myself, not trudge like a tramp along a dusty road with a pack on my back.’
I looked up to see who had spoken that I should hear. I saw a youngish man whose fair hair was sparse and thin. He had well-covered arms and neck showing from his green sports shirt and he spoke to a girl who sat beside him.
I immediately hated him—his silly words, his voice, and his fleshy arms.
Is it to impress the woman, I thought angrily, that he pretends to be so mondaine—so ‘sophisticated’, as he would be sure to put it? That pitiful attempt at playing the bored man-about-town; didn’t he know that it was soiled and tawdry when Horace Walpole was young? Didn’t that fat cow’s face know that the best thing for it would be to sweat away some of Windledon costiveness?
I was getting altogether too hot about the affair; but I have found that the one thing that enrages me is to overhear what I have been meant to overhear. After his words I began suddenly to feel tired, to feel hot and dirty and dissatisfied. I walked wearily into Salcombe and thought of Tennyson. The sun on the water—Crossing the Bar; I wondered who had told me all about it. In the piled up and seemingly terraced town I saw someone painting in a picturesque nook. An open door, a geranium in a window, the harbour seen through a narrow crack between the houses, they were all there.
I left the town and crossed the bar myself.
From here again my journey is lost. I only know that I spent one night in a hostel perched on the side of a steep hill with trees all round it, and that I found a silver spoon there. It seemed to be sent specially to compensate me for the one I’d lost at Midhurst. This was a modern spoon, but thick, and with a rounded end. I put it in my rucksack with satisfaction, wondering who had left it.
Further on my journey I know I walked with a boy from Bermondsey. He was full of gaiety and content, telling me all about his office work, his delight in the country.
‘Why don’t you get a business job,’ he kept on asking me, ‘and make some money? Art’s no good for making money.’ Then he would stop and bubble over with pleasure at the wood we were walking through, or the view from the hill top.
‘Bloody lovely,’ he’d say; ‘it’s bloody lovely,’ or ‘Christ, what a place this is! It’s fucking wonderful.’ I was delighted with so much exuberance and listened to him carefully, for he swore and shouted his praise with so much fervour that his sentences were really startling.
We seemed to run and skip a great deal of the way. He was always chasing something and getting me to follow, leaping streams and fences.
Once when we bathed in a rocky pool I saw the ingrained dirt in his white back—little black spots like pepper across the skin.
‘Scratch it,’ he said urgently, offering it to me and arching it like an animal’s, ‘it itches like hell, Christ how it itches!’
I scratched with my nails until he gave contented guttural noises. I left long red lines on the white skin in a strange criss-cross pattern. ‘Now you look tattooed,’ I shouted, ‘you don’t know what I’ve written on your back!’
He came to duck me and I floundered away from him into the trees.
With the sunlight dappling our skin, we raced in and out of the trees until he knocked me down and sat on me. I felt the twigs digging into my back.
‘Get off,’ I yelled, ‘you’re suffocating me.’ He rolled down beside me and we lay there till the sun had dried us.
I must have lost him soon after this, for he was not with me when I entered Taunton.
It was evening, and I found that I only had a few shillings left in my pocket; meals in hotels and other small extravagances had done their work. I knew that on the next day I would have to think seriously. I put it off till then, refusing to look at the problem.
I found the hostel in the High Street quite full. People walked about with cooking pots in their hands, whistling or singing as they made their evening meal. One couple I particularly noticed, chiefly because other people also were giving them covert glances.
The man was in very short corduroy shorts and a dirty coral shirt. His hairy legs were bare and he had a curly, brown, rather matted beard. On his feet were sandals made only of thin straps of dried and cracking leather. He wore a ring of lapis and a cross on a greasy string round his neck.
The girl was perhaps less startling; she was plump with wide hips also encased in green corduroy. Her hair was a natural brassy colour, worn resting on the shoulders, and her make-up seemed to consist of oatmeal, cochineal and coffee. I don’t know why the kitchen ingredients jumped into my mind, but I know that her cosmetics did remind me of food; perhaps it was because they were applied with the same sort of carelessness as cooks have when they mix their dishes.
The man looked at me as he passed; he was carrying a sausage on a fork.
‘Good evening,’ he said, in one of those sweet soft voices which are so affected that it is difficult to tell the speaker’s place of origin. This voice might have been anything; it sounded cockney, cultured, Welsh, French to me.
After he and his girl had eaten their sausage, he came over to talk to me, leaving her to do the washing-up.
‘Ah, I thought you were an artist too,’ he said, having questioned me and found that I was at an art school. ‘I never went to an art school myself, I think they’re inventions of the devil; I just started painting on my own in a studio over a shop.’
Hearing more of his voice, I now realised that he was English and that all the strangeness of his tones was due to conscious effort. I looked at his face more closely. It was good-looking and unattractive as bearded faces often are. He had those thin, delicately-made features which I do not like, perhaps because I share the conventional association of them with coldness and cruelty.
He went on talking to me, telling me how he ran across the road to fetch his meals from a little restaurant, if he could not be bothered to cook them; otherwise he cooked his kippers and his sausages on the gas-ring in the studio. The girl, I gathered, was often there to help him or pose for him. She sat and mended his clothes for him too, but they did not live together.
‘And do you manage to sell your pictures?’ I asked, trying to make this difficult question sound polite.
‘Yes,’ came his light, surprising answer, ‘I manage to get rid of them very well. I know most people moan and groan that nobody buys anything nowadays, but I don’t find any difficulty. Whenever I want any more money I just take a picture round to a little man I know and he sells it for me.’
This was all said in a vague, distant, casual tone that somehow failed to be convincing. It was the exaggerated casualness, I think, rather than the preposterous story which made one disbelieve.
Everything about this person seemed a caricature, an over-drawing of some novel character. I wondered how he had managed to make and preserve the businessman, and to poke fun at the dreary money-grabber; he fitted perfectly into a very worn-out pattern.
‘Ma chère,’ he called out, ‘ma chère, come over here and talk with us.’
The girl came and sat down stolidly beside him. He stroked her hair and hummed a little song; then he smiled sweetly and withdrew into a deep reverie.
It was interesting to me to see someone so overlaid as this. Such consistency was very unusual.
It seemed unnatural to me to see the man and the woman separated that night. This did not fit in with the picture of the gas-ring, the kippers, the dirt between the toes and the immortal canvases.
When I saw them in the morning, going off on a battered green tandem, pedalling soberly, I again had the feeling that this was a little out of keeping with his carefully built-up character. Surely they should have travelled with a donkey or a dear little goat in harness.
I walked into the street of Taunton, not knowing what I was going to do. To write or telegraph to my aunt for money would take too long; bes
ides, I did not like to think of her face when she received the notice. She did not have charge of my money affairs now and she would consider my request a great nuisance and just like me. If I wrote to my father’s office it would take even longer and there would be even more questions to answer.
I decided to do neither of these things, but to walk in the direction of home until something happened. This was really not a decision at all, but simply the absence of any plan.
As I walked along the main road cars shot past me, making me envious of their speed. I was just beginning to wonder if I should ever be offered a lift when a rather disreputable car passed me, slowed down, and finally stopped. The driver was looking back, craning his neck out of the window.
‘Want a lift?’ he yelled heartily.
I ran forward, feeling very grateful. I fitted myself into the seat beside him and slammed the door, making it shake crazily.
‘How far do you want to go?’ my companion asked. He wore a Harris tweed cap which matched his tawny little moustache, and his face was thin and smooth and pink.
‘As far as I can; I’ve run out of money and I’ve got to get home.’ I laughed, feeling the next moment I should not have mentioned my penniless state to a stranger.
He smiled, looking straight in front of him. ‘Well, I can take you as far as Stonehenge. Is that any good to you? After that I’ve got to branch off.’
‘Oh, that’ll be marvellous,’ I said, ‘it seems half across England when you’re walking; it must be sixty or seventy miles at least.’
The rattling car was speeding along now. The man began to speak to me as if he’d known me for a long time. He asked me, not too obtrusively, where I’d been to school, and told me that he had been at Charterhouse.
‘And what do you do now?’ he asked. ‘I’m at an art school.’
‘Oh, that’s interesting, because I work for a firm of cloth manufacturers and we badly want some new designs for shirt materials. Do you think that would be in your line at all? We want some new stripes and smart designs to compete with the French, who at present produce all the best “English” shirt materials. Rather odd, isn’t it?’ he laughed.
I was surprised at this sudden proposal. He seemed quite serious.
‘I’ve only done designs for curtain fabrics, ‘I said, ‘big patterns to be printed by hand from woodblocks. How does one set about designing for machine printing? I suppose the thing to do is to make a very accurate drawing on paper?’
I secretly wished that this subject had not arisen; I did not care for the idea of designing shirt stripes. It seemed such very paltry, insignificant work. ‘What is there to design?’ I thought. ‘A stripe is a stripe.’
We went on talking for some time about the intricacies of shirt stripes, and I promised to do some designs and send them to him, if I had the time. I added this to exonerate me, for I knew that I would never think of designing a shirt stripe. This is what people call ‘missing an opportunity’ I thought, and I wished that one day someone might offer me an opportunity which I would want to take.
Racing along in the car, I saw nothing. I listened to my new friend and at the same time became conscious of a curious smell growing ever stronger as the heat of the day increased. It came from the back of the car and reminded me of cheese, wine and fish glue—a really terrible smell. It had such body and strength that it seemed to coat the insides of my nostrils, clinging there in a layer.
Once I looked round swiftly and saw nothing but piles of cardboard boxes and some luggage.
‘Is it the dressing on the shirts,’ I asked myself, ‘or does he travel in cheeses also?’
He was soon telling me anecdotes of sport and amusement abroad. He knew the South of France and Austria. Except for the extraordinary smell the atmosphere was urbane, not to say fashionable. I liked him, for he was kind and tolerant, accepting everything as it was.
‘What’s the time?’ he said, looking at his wrist. ‘It’s after one, we’d better stop and have something to eat.’
This was a moment of embarrassment for me, for I had hardly any food in my rucksack and I knew that he would insist on my sharing some of his own provisions.
He stopped the car and leant over the back of the seat, dragging at one of the suitcases. He pulled it out and suggested that we should have our meal in the fields. Leaving the car on the side of the road, we went through a gate which led us into a little green glade, surrounded by trees. We sat down on his mackintosh and he opened the suitcase.
It contained nothing but a huge Dundee cake and several bottles of cider.
‘Have a piece,’ he said, cutting a thick, flat chunk for me and holding it out.
I took it, protesting that I ought not to eat his food. ‘Don’t be absurd, look at the size of the cake,’ he said. It was, indeed, enormous.
He chucked one of the bottles of cider over to me recklessly.
‘Wash it down with that,’ he ordered. The bottle fizzed and buzzed at being treated so roughly.
I murmured another remark, and opened the bottle. Tiny bubbles rose to the neck and made a slight foam there. I tilted it to my lips and swallowed the foam and the red-gold liquid; then I bit into the rich cake.
The sun was beating down now, making the grass humid and dank, almost drawing steam from it. The elms in the fields by the road were heavy and grey with dust.
My companion began to tell me sexy stories. He did it with the bored, well-bred manner people often assume for these occasions.
‘… and that was that,’ he drawled, giving me only the shadow of a smile at the end.
We were eating a great deal of the cake, and two bottles lay empty in the grass.
He opened another for me and held it out. I took it, feeling rather dazed; my head had begun to buzz and the heavy cake seemed to be ploughing about inside me.
When we got up to go I felt quite drunk, chiefly, I think, on account of the sun beating down on my head as I drank the two large bottles of fizzy cider.
I was ashamed to disclose my weak head to my companion, so after we had both turned our faces to the bushes, I carefully allowed him to lead the way back to the car.
I wedged myself into the deflated tub seat and we rattled off again. I leant with my face to the window, hoping that the wind would revive me. I hoped never to see plum cake again in my life.
He left me exactly at the fork where Stonehenge stands.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, ‘don’t forget about the designs.’
I was already half-thinking of the monoliths. ‘Goodbye, thank you so much. I can hardly believe I’ve come so far in one day. You’ve no idea how it’s helped me.’ I waved to him and watched him disappearing with his cheese smell and those mysterious cardboard boxes.
I went quickly round the wire enclosure to the entrance where I paid my sixpence. It ought to be all alone on the open plain, I thought, not enclosed in wire and caught in the fork of two main roads.
The little man in the wooden booth looked sour and disgruntled. He clipped off my ticket and I was inside the enclosure.
As I walked quickly towards the stones, I caught up a woman and her daughter; at least I supposed they were mother and daughter, they seemed so to me, for one was middle-aged and one was young, and both had small heads and short, clipped, mannish hair.
‘Oh, isn’t it wonderful?’ the young girl said to me. ‘I’ve come thousands of miles to see this and it’s worth it.’
The mother turned round and seemed to accept me in a moment. She smiled but said nothing. They both wore sandals and short kilted skirts. The girl had slung across her shoulder a very efficient-looking little German camera.
‘We’ve just come from London where we thought the parks were so lovely,’ the girl went on. ‘In America we’ve got nothing like that. You can’t imagine how different it is.’
She stood on a fallen stone which slanted into the earth. Looking down at her feet, she described more of the wonders of England and the emptiness of America. Her quiet voic
e seemed almost despairing. Everything was new to her; she gave praise and blame, as if it were a duty. She gave me to understand in a moment that they were poor and that they loved culture and beauty better than anything else in the world.
I left them still standing on the stone, in the middle of Salisbury Plain.
Now that I was so much nearer home I could spend my few remaining shillings with a more comfortable feeling. I spent that night at the Nether Wallop Hostel and the next day moved on to Winchester. The warden remembered me and seemed pleased to see me; I thought that if necessary I would ask her to lend me the money for my train fare back to Sussex, but first I wanted to see a little more of Winchester and its surroundings.
That afternoon I spent looking at the antique shops. There was a sort of covered-in mart, piled high with furniture, only narrow alleys being left between. Perched dangerously on its tables were pieces of china and plate—cheese covers, egg-cup stands and tobacco jars. I found two royal blue and gold saucers and a cup marked with tiny crescents on the bottom. The blue and gold husks hung in swags from gold medallions and underneath all this decoration the china was fluted.
I took the Worcester pieces to the shopman and asked him, ‘How much?’ He said, ‘Half-a-crown,’ and I, thinking of my almost empty pocket, said, ‘One-and-six.’ I won, after a little more arguing, and took the things away delightedly. They proved to be a great nuisance and anxiety at the hostel, as I was for ever wondering if someone had knocked them from the rickety shelf beside my bed. At last I gave them to the warden to keep.
As I bathed in the river under the mill the next morning, I thought that I would walk all that day up the banks of the Itchen, exploring for as far as I could go.
I climbed out of the town up a narrow rather slum-like street, and at one point, on looking back, I saw the enormous squat cathedral crouching to the ground like an animal. The smooth roofs dominated and half-hid the walls and buttresses. I saw the cross-shape clearly.