by Norman Lewis
More stimulating still was Mr Bowles’ museum, housed in part of the stable buildings, containing an elephant’s skull, innumerable fossils, and a wonderful collection of stuffed birds. Mr Bowles employed his own taxidermist, the possessor of remarkable imagination and taste, who did not simply stuff birds, but ‘set them up’, in naturalistic and convincing attitudes, furnishing the large cases in which they were displayed with objects such as stones and artfully counterfeited grasses, twigs and foliage in reproduction of the subject’s natural environment.
Mr Bowles, who himself did not care to shoot, had shown ingenuity and perseverance in establishing his collection. His method was to distribute coloured illustrations of rare birds to all the gamekeepers in the area with a list of bounties payable, based on the bird’s scarcity. In this way he had secured, as he put it, great rarities, including a bittern, a hen harrier, and the only great spotted woodpecker recorded in this country, all of them shown in the sprightly postures of feeding, of courtship, or aggression. The taxidermist’s masterpiece was a family of long-eared owls, the last chick having actually been assisted to hatch out before inclusion in a still-life composition which the young all clamoured for their share of a vole in which the male bird, wings outstretched, was shown holding in its beak.
We were free to wander at will over the Bowles land, which shared a special kind of stagnant beauty with that of the great neighbouring estates. This had once been part of a royal chase, in the making of which so many homesteads and hamlets had disappeared. What remained was a vista of parkland sparsely planted with oaks and elms, and a small wood here and there where once the red deer hunted by the King and his nobles could take shelter and reproduce their species. The deer had been able to look after themselves, but the pheasants that replaced them could not, and their rearing for the gun demanded the elimination of half the native forms of wild life. Nowadays the woods were full of little gallows on which the gamekeepers displayed their ghastly trophies.
The sportsmen had got rid of the fauna, and Victorian planthunters had completed the gentle monotony of the scene. Mr Bowles could remember from his childhood the royal ferns, the orchids and the lilies of the valley that grew here before they had been uprooted to end their days in Victorian conservatories. Of these not a sign remained. This was a place, too, without a past. There must have been heroes, prophets, saints, here too as there had been in Wales, but if so no memory of them remained. In Forty Hill, Bull’s Cross and Whitewebbs, we faced the matter-of-fact nothingness of present times from which the imagination offered no escape. Here we were watched by no unseen presences. Who could have imagined Arthur or the enchanter Merlin walking amongst these trees, or Druids working their magic in these fields?
Mr Bowles was always available to us, always pleased to be called on. We were debarred entrance by the front door of Myddelton House, but he was usually to be found sitting at the window of his study at the back, or else on the seat of the adjoining lavatory, which displayed two-thirds of his body to the garden. A whistle would bring him to the back entrance to let the caller in.
He painted wild flowers for reproduction in his books, often taking several days over a single crocus. He would freely, as if talking to another artist, discuss his work, but apart from that the talk was usually on mending the fences of character. His theory was that all of us boys suffered from a ‘besetting sin’, and having established what it was, he would hammer away at it continually. Although most of us felt that there was nothing much wrong with us as we were, a wickedness had to be concocted to satisfy Mr Bowles. From the way the conversation went it was clear that he was on the look-out for admissions of lust, but failing all else he was ready to settle for gluttony or sloth. We played our part in a straight-faced way in this charade, but it struck us, nevertheless, as absurd that a boy who had to get up at five every morning to do a paper round for which he was paid one shilling and six pence a week should be obliged to accuse himself of being lazy, and that others who suffered the ignominy of being fed ‘on the parish’ at the soup kitchen in Lavender Road School should confess to being gluttons. We would have agreed in a respectful and uncritical manner that the rich as we saw them were slothful, lustful, wrathful, covetous and gluttonous, but the sins Mr Bowles warned us against were in the main beyond our reach.
Mr Bowles was convinced that religion of almost any brand — including even Spiritualism — was good for the poor, but was not at all sure that spiritual healing, as practised by my mother, could provide any real benefit. He saw it as tending to short-circuit the reformatory process of sickness when associated with a reasonable amount of pain. What, after all, would become of the quality of fortitude if pain did not exist? Nevertheless, he was much intrigued by the story, which had gone the rounds, of Miss Tupperton and her dog, and asked for whatever further details of the case I could get. These I promised to provide.
It turned out that, confronted in the end with Miss Tupperton’s tearful beseechings to heal the animal of its diarrhoea by a discharge of her spiritual currents, my mother had stalled by telling her that she would have to consult with members of her circle, now twelve in number, before reaching a decision. Thus Spiritualists had never been able to define the territories of their belief, nor make up their minds on a number of fundamental principles. In this case a dispute immediately arose as to whether or not animals had souls, and it was argued that if they had not, spiritual healing was neither appropriate nor would be beneficial. For decades now innumerable seekers after the truth had plied the spirits with their questions, yet the beyond remained seen as through a glass darkly. Did the birds sing there? Did the flowers bloom in spring? Should there be no more cakes and ale? Was love still thwarted? Could it be, according to a large body of Spiritualist opinion, that those who passed on were not even freed from the processes of ageing — however benign — and if youthful skin was wrinkled in the end, and hairs turned white, did not a second death await them on the other side?
Those who were attached to animals were in the majority in Forty Hill, and they could not imagine a future life in which they would be separated from their horses, their dogs, their cats. But all the voices of the other world speaking through such as my father seemed unable to decide — or even to have failed to notice — whether they were present or not. The arguments that went on through the movement were reflected in the conflicting opinions of my mother’s circle. My mother believed that domestic animals, ‘put into the world to serve men’, were immortal, but that all the rest lived and died and that was the end of them. She was opposed by Mrs Thresher and several supporters who argued that you had to draw the line somewhere. If dogs, why not rats? Why not jellyfish? Why not tapeworms? Why not the most primitive of all forms of life, manifesting itself in a single cell? Long and earnest discussions took place, but in the end my mother was victorious, agreement was reached and pets were confirmed in their possession of souls. Miss Tupperton was invited to bring her dog back for treatment, which was successful, for in due course the diarrhoea cleared up.
Two years later I visited Myddelton House for what proved to be the last time. I found an enormous green Bentley standing outside the front entrance. It belonged to a nephew Mr Bowles did not particularly like, and I had reason to suspect that as soon as he had heard the bellow of its exhaust in the drive he would have slipped away to hide, either in the museum or the garden. In the end I found him in his summer house painting a fritillaria dug up on some Greek island. The summer house — his favourite place of refuge — was built over a little lake upon which floated the great enamelled shapes of water lilies of many colours. The banks had been planted with Japanese irises and a Chinese thicket of bamboo and thorns, to provide cover for the birds which flashed their wings and sung among them continually. Once in a while, Mr Bowles said, some rarity — and he had mentioned a Cetti’s warbler — would be attracted to this seductive environment and encouraged to nest there. When this happened, he would send for a marksman to secure the bird or birds, and
his taxidermist would create another masterpiece, in the case of the Cetti’s warbler perched on a reed, a dragonfly in its bill, over the nest: an aquatic tableau completed with feathery rushes, waxen flowers, and green painted glass that never quite counterfeited water.
He looked up from his work, and for a moment I thought he hadn’t recognized me, but then he waved. I noticed that he was using a magnifying glass held in his left hand, while he painted with the right, and remembered that back in the days of the confirmation class his sight had seemed to me to be weak.
I may have been the only one of his pupils who displayed interest in his garden, and he was eager to show me his latest example of the triumph of ingenuity over environment. This was a small orange tree, imported from Spain, its roots still embedded in a hundredweight of Spanish soil, which after much experimentation with mulching, fertilizers and liquid feeds, but without the aid of artificial heat, had produced a single, small greenish fruit. Although, like so many rich men, Mr Bowles believed himself to be poor and wore his brother’s cast-off clothes, he had spent a considerable sum to build a walled enclosure round this tree, fitted on the inside with adjustable mirrors which had to be constantly varied in their angle to the sun to reflect its maximum light. It was a bad time for the visit, for on entering the enclosure, the first thing we saw was the single orange lying on the ground, where some small boy had thrown it in disgust after biting into its bitter flesh. Mr Bowles showed stoicism over this reverse, the latest of many acts of vandalism from which he had suffered. In the last week alone, the cloth on the billiard table had been ripped, and the display case with a tableau of Long Eared Owls smashed and their stuffed newly-hatched chicks scattered about the floor. It was a small price to pay, he seemed to think, for the satisfaction it gave him to watch over the young and guide them into the right paths at the time when they were most open to influence.
We walked on. One of the members of this year’s confirmation class was cutting his initials in the trunk of a tree from Patagonia, and others chased each other across beds in which rare plants grew that had to be fussed over by the gardeners like sickly children. Mr Bowles followed them with his failing eyes, intoxicated with the aroma of early adolescence — so soon to fade. His one sorrow was that none of them could be relied upon to become regular church-goers, and would almost certainly desert the faith as I had done. His theory was that boring sermons lay at the bottom of the trouble. Mr Bowles’ father, who had been patron of the living, had refused to allow sermons to be preached at all, and in his days every pew had been full. I knew only too well why, but it had nothing to do with sermons.
He asked how many people attended my mother’s church — managing to infuse the word with a civilized tolerance that concealed his contempt — and I told him up to two hundred in fine weather.
‘And do you really think she cured that wretched dog of diarrhoea?’ he asked, and I said I thought it would have got better in any case.
‘She’s reputed to be very successful with her treatment, however unorthodox it may seem.’
‘Half the people who go to her only imagine they’re ill, sir.’
‘So it’s faith, then. A case of pick up thy bed, thy faith hath made thee whole.’
‘That’s all she claims for it,’ I told him.
‘Did you know your father makes up wonderful medicines?’ he asked, and I told him I helped with the bottling at weekends.
‘Interesting to know what they contain.’
‘Nothing very much,’ I said. ‘Water and flavouring mostly.’
‘A case of faith again.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I wish you hadn’t told me that,’ Mr Bowles said. ‘I’ve been taking that elixir of his for years.’
Our path led us to the bank of the New River, the great canal cut by Mr Bowles’ ancestor, Sir Hugh Myddelton, to bring well-water to London, upon which the family’s fortunes had been established. Several boys were fishing. One of them, at a distance from the rest, was dressed in a grotesque fashion. Mr Bowles explained that this scare-crow result followed a campaign by the Mothers’ Union to persuade necessitous mothers to attempt, at least, to make their boys clothing in addition to dresses they normally made for their daughters. This boy, like several other members of the class, had been sent to mix with his friends wearing a cap and jacket produced in the home, and they had turned their backs on him. All the Mothers’ Union had succeeded in doing was to create social pariahs.
While this sad business was under discussion we suddenly heard the sound of ringing, jubilant voices, recognized with alarm by Mr Bowles as those of his nephew and the girl he had brought with him, who were clearly coming in our direction. He hastily grabbed me and we ducked into some bushes remaining hidden until the couple passed. From the glimpse I caught of them he was as handsome and dashing as I knew he would be, and she as beautiful, the pair of them differing not so much from natives of Enfield in their beauty and their dignity, but by the way in which they spoke, and for all who might be listening to their intimacies to hear. The fact was that Mr Bowles’ village boys had no existence for them. They probably did not even register their presence. They were so splendid, but why had God given them the Earth?
When they were out of sight — although the gay lilting voices went on and on — Mr Bowles and I came out from behind the bushes and began our walk back, and soon the summer house was in sight. Around us the birds kept up their chorus. A shower came and went, bringing down a little sodden blossom and pelting the surface of the lake with the heavy summer raindrops the dragonflies so effortlessly avoided. The smoke of burning sap from the gardener’s fire tickled the membranes of my nose, a dog barked, a fish splashed, the swifts dived on us with their thin, delirious screeching. Even the rich could possess no finer moment than this.
Mr Bowles took up his brush and his magnifying glass again. ‘My eyes are going fast,’ he said.
‘Can’t the doctors do anything for you, sir?’
‘I’ve seen the man at Moorfields and he’s given me up.’ He laughed. ‘Your mother’s my only hope now. Perhaps I should see her.’
I nodded, showing apparently slight enthusiasm.
‘You seem so sceptical,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you say something encouraging?’
‘I know she’d be happy to see you,’ I said, ‘and there’s nothing to be lost in seeing her, but if it’s the faith that counts, I suppose it depends more on you than upon her.’
Chapter Five
BY THE TIME I left Enfield Grammar School the ice-age following the great American slump had set in. At best a grammar school education, however sound, offered few more exciting prospects at the end of the day than employment in a high street bank, and the world crisis and its dole queues had put even this beyond my reach. In common with most of my friends I had to turn my hand to whatever came my way. The experience of those years fostered resilience — possibly even, of necessity, a sense of adventure.
Some of my schoolfriends who had hoped to sit at office desks found themselves earning their bread in less conventional and often less sedentary ways. One, unable to continue his accountancy studies, was appointed assistant rat-catcher to the council, and later set up on his own and did well. A second who suffered from some sexual obsession became a professional partner at the Tottenham Palais de Dance, enabled in this way to kill both the financial and sexual birds with one stone. A third made journeys to Spain and returned laden with cheap Toledan crucifixes which he advertised in the Catholic press as blessed by the Bishop of Salamanca. For a while I did less well, continuing to bottle the elixir for which I earned about thirty shillings a week.
Questions of prestige were closely limited to those of economic necessity in the matter of finding employment. Enfield possessed some of the largest apple and cherry orchards in that part of England, and there was cash to be had when the season for their picking arrived. In the case of the apples it was easier to concentrate on the windfalls, but the prestige job — picking fro
m the trees — entailed the manipulation of heavy ladders, and the very small risk of a fall, and although there was slightly less money in it, it was what everybody wanted to do.
The part-time employment to be found in the cherry orchards was not only in picking the fruit, but in scaring away the thousands of blackbirds and thrushes that would come winging in for the feast, particularly in the early morning hours. It conferred prestige to be engaged by the farm to shoot these with a twelve-bore — a bird’s corpse had to be produced for every cartridge expended — but social annihilation to enrol oneself among the group that patrolled the orchards in the early hours beating on drums. The most demeaning employment of all, taken by one of my ex-school friends, involved him in washing up for a Soho restaurant, and placing himself, dressed as a clown, at the entrance to display the menu provided for the lunch-time and evening meals.
With the expiry of childhood, Enfield had become a dull place. Almost from one year to another Mr Bowles had become old and blind, and I no longer took refuge at Myddelton House. The alluring Miss Tupperton was carried away by a dashing Major Pinkies, who had dropped in to the Hall one day to visit his old commanding officer and had not hesitated to plunder him in this way. Her place was now taken by a pretty and muscular young nurse, called in to help with Sir Henry’s gout. My parents had come to the realistic conclusion that whatever dormant psychic gifts I might have possessed, I had little to offer the Spiritualist movement, and there was no hope whatever of my following in my father’s footsteps. Nevertheless, membership of their church continually increased.