At one o’clock O’Riorden came from his office into the clerks’ room, the Three S’s shut their heavy ledgers with triumphant slams, and four chairs were ritually arranged round the fireplace, though there was no fire in it. Sykes produced four cups from a cupboard, Sayers handed me twopence and a great jug and instructed me to fetch tea from a neighbouring restaurant, which was one small room, a couple of steps below street level, festering with steam and sweat and the smell of cheap food.
When I returned to the office, Mr. O’Riorden and the Three S’s had produced packets of sandwiches and had already begun their lunch; and Sloper was asking: “Well, gentlemen, what is the subject before the meeting today?”
“That Woman,” said Sayers, “is the End All and Be All of Existence; and when our fellow wage-slave William Essex has charged our beakers, I will begin the proceedings by asking you to drink to this toast:
Here’s to the girl with the bluest eyes
The darkest hair and the whitest—”
“William,” said Mr O’Riorden, looking at me uneasily over his spectacles, “haven’t you brought any lunch?”
“No, Mr. O’Riorden,” I said.
“Then you’d better come with me.”
Mr. O’Riorden put on his silk hat, took me by the arm and led me from the room amid the ironical cheers of the Three S’s. “Bravo, O’Riorden!” Sayers shouted, banging a cup upon a chair. “Bravo, the saviour of William’s youth and purity.”
We went to the stinking little restaurant from which I had brought the tea. Mr. O’Riorden’s was not the only silk hat there, for silk hats at that time had nothing to do with income. Mr. O’Riorden opened his packet of sandwiches upon the table that was covered with flaking American cloth, ordered tea for both of us and some sandwiches for me.
“Ye’ll take no notice of them three daft skites,” he said. “They’re all wind and blather and devil a bit of harm to ’em at all.”
I thanked him for bringing me out, and finding him in a friendly mood I suddenly blurted out the truth about my loneliness, of the life I had led for the last three years, and about my resolve not to go home again.
“’Tis a hell of a thing,” he said, looking at me compassionately and helping himself to snuff, “when ye’re not aisy with yer own flesh and blood. ’Tis the worst sort of trouble there is, and only a fool tries to cure it. Mr. Summerway told me most there is to know about ye, but he didn’t say ye’d not be having a roof over yer head.”
“I could sleep in the office,” I said, “till I find some rooms.”
“Ach, to hell with that. What would ye say now to coming home with me? There’s only me an’ the missus and Dermot. There was Fergus, too. But Fergus is away out to America to join my brother who’s doing a sight better than I am. So you can have Fergus’s bed. You’ll have to share a room with Dermot. He’s seventeen.”
I thanked Mr. O’Riorden fervently for thus removing a torment that had been in the back of my mind all day, but he silenced me with a wave of the hand, and the watery little eyes in his yellow face took on a pensive inward look. “It’s queer the way things turn out,” he said. “There was me and there was Conal—that’s me brother in America—without a tail to the shirt of us. And off he goes to America to become a policeman an’ off I go to England to become a rich man. For it was I that had all the learning there was between us, and he nothing but a pair of feet the size you could make tombstones of ’em. And now it’s he that’s rolling in money with a chain of stores the length of me arm, and me that’s takin’ the office boy home to pay a few shillings towards the rent. Ach, well; let’s be gettin’ back to see what them three young hell-rakers are after doing.”
I lived with the O’Riordens for five years, and very happy years they were. To look at, Ancoats was not much better than Hulme, but it was better for me in every way. From the moment I stepped over the O’Riordens’ threshold that first evening I was at home with them. I began on a satisfactory financial basis, which gave me status and did not make me feel like an interloper. I was to pay twelve-and-six a week for my share of a room and my food, and Mrs. O’Riorden was the sort of housekeeper who could do that and make a small profit. She was a Lancashire woman who had worked in a mill, but had no need to do so any more. She had a Lancashire woman’s pride in her house, and 26, Gibraltar Street shone, from the whitened front doorstep to the brass knobs on the bed in the room I was to share with Dermot.
It was this shining quality of the house that impressed me at once. My own house had been dim and dingy; Mr. Oliver’s house had been dim with a sort of faded grandeur, but Mrs. O’Riorden’s house was a riot of gleaming surfaces. Mirrors and crockery, steel fender and fire-irons, picture-frames, chests-of-drawers, linoleum, all filled the house with twinkles; and it was a treat to see her tackle the deal kitchen table with silver-sand and elbow grease, as though she were determined sooner or later to coax a smile even to its dull and unresponsive surface.
I have the clearest recollection of the great kindliness with which I was received, of the absence of embarrassing questions, of the simple frank acceptance of the fact that here was a boy whom father had brought home because he wanted somewhere to live, and somewhere to live he should have. I was taken upstairs to the room that contained two beds: one that had been Fergus’s and now was to be mine, and one that was Dermot’s; and then I went to the scullery where already Mr. O’Riorden, who had taken off his coat, waistcoat and collar, was making great play with soap behind his ears. I took my turn, and then returned to the kitchen, which was the living-room, and there found that Mr. O’Riorden had put on his waistcoat, but not his collar, a pair of carpet slippers, an old jacket and a smoking-cap with a rakish tassel. He looked a new, a more comfortable, an altogether different Mr. O’Riorden. It was evident that home was the place where Mr. O’Riorden was happiest, and that he knew it.
The fire was burning brightly; Mrs. O’Riorden had lit a lamp and set it on the table where already she had laid an extra place for me. Mr. O’Riorden stood before the fire on the thick rag mat, comfortably warming his behind and keeping his back to the portrait of Queen Victoria, in a shining frame, wearing a crown and a blue sash, and the Order of the Garter, and a fat sulky frown. Mrs. O’Riorden, whose bosom was as comfortable as the Queen’s, but who looked an altogether more cheerful and companionable person, was fussing here and there between the fire and the table.
We were waiting for Dermot, and soon he came in, a thin, rather pale-faced red-head, quite unlike either of his parents. His eyes were pale, and he had long gawky wrists covered with fine gold hair. He had fly-away eyebrows, rushing up like little opened wings. When he saw me, a stranger, they flew up higher, as though they would rush away altogether with surprise and agitation. He accepted me with the friendliness his mother had shown. There was a great courtesy about Dermot, cloaked in a great shyness. I never forgot him as he stood there that night, anxious to fly from the unexpected, constrained by his good manners to stand his ground and give himself to me in friendliness. He was working for a cabinetmaker, and as we shook hands I saw that there was a fine powdering of sawdust in his eyebrows and in the hair on his wrists.
We ate Lancashire hot-pot, and then we ate apple dumplings and then we all had a hot strong cup of tea. It was a satisfactory evening meal as Lancashire understood it; and for my part, though I’ve eaten the faldelals of the most famous restaurants since then, I don’t know that I prefer them to that.
Washing-up was a communal activity. I carried the things to the scullery; Mr. O’Riorden washed them, Mrs. O’Riorden wiped them, and Dermot put them away. The white cloth was whipped from the kitchen table, a red one was put in its place, and Mr. O’Riorden took a book from the book-case. He sat on one side of the fire and Mrs. O’Riorden, with a basket of darning, on the other. “Now, mother,” said Mr. O’Riorden, “we’ve just got up to the death of Little Nell.” He began to read.
I had read no novels with Mr. Oliver. I had never read a novel or heard one rea
d; and I didn’t hear much of The Old Curiosity Shop that night. Dermot made a sign with his head. I followed him into the scullery. He shut the kitchen door. “Let’s leave ’em,” he said. “They’re happy. Come and have a look at this.”
We stumbled down the dark path which cut the tiny garden into halves. At the end, Dermot said: “Stand still while I get a light.” A latch clicked, a match was struck, and presently I walked into the small shed which leaned against the end wall of the garden. “This is my place,” Dermot said. “What d’you think of it?”
I looked about me by the light of the lantern swinging from the roof. A work-bench almost filled the shed. There was just room to move round it. Shavings were everywhere, shavings and sawdust, and the air was full of the lovely smell of wood. There were hammers, planes, chisels, gouges, saws, and there was a glue-pot and a small oil-stove for heating it. “There’s no screw-driver,” I said.
“I never use screws,” Dermot answered with a smile. “You wouldn’t insult a lovely job like that with a screw.”
He ran his hand lovingly over a piece of work that stood on the bench. It was a cupboard flanked by bookshelves, and the door of the cupboard was not yet on. It lay alongside the other work, with a rough scrawl of pencil markings upon it. Here and there gouges had bitten into the marks. A design was beginning to take shape. “For Father to keep his old Dickens in,” Dermot explained. “It won’t be finished before Christmas at the rate I’m getting on. No time. I ought to give all the time I’ve got to this sort of thing.”
He moved about in the scanty room of the workshop with the light from the lantern falling on his high cheekbones and his freakish, fly-away eyebrows. He rubbed his hand caressingly up and down the planks that leaned against the wall. “Oak. Ash. Walnut. Teak.” His voice sounded as Mr. Oliver’s had done when he was reading a poem. Suddenly he asked: “What do you think of William Morris?”
I had never heard of William Morris, and said so. Then Dermot’s pale eyes lighted up with a missionary fervour, and I began to think that, if I lived long with him, William Morris was someone of whom I should hear a great deal. But it was characteristic of Dermot that, having flared like a rocket and shot his fire, he never mentioned William Morris again except in the most casual fashion. But that night, kicking to and fro among the shavings, feeling the edges of his tools, rubbing his hand over his planks, and taking a gouge or two at the design on his cupboard door, he preached the gospel of William Morris with a hot and eloquent tongue. Beauty in every home, each stick of furniture lovely and appropriate, every workman a craftsman glorying in his craft, loving his material, such was the burden of the song into which Dermot broke lyrically that night. He never sang it again, but I never forgot it, never had any doubt of the joy he found in that little shed, or of the passion he could impart to a thing that lay close to him.
It was a fruitful passion, too. Let me go ahead here a little and say that during the five years I lived with the O’Riordens I saw the furnishing of the house change under Dermot’s hands. He finished the book-case for his father; and after that, one by one, appeared an oak refectory table for the kitchen, with bulbous legs, sumptuously carved, chairs to match it, covered with leather which he stinted himself to buy, and in Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden’s bedroom occurred a bed of such gothic splendour that Mrs. O’Riorden declared she was afraid to sleep in it: it looked too much, she said, like the bed in which Henry the Eighth had murdered all his wives. These were but the main waves of a tide of craftsmanship which Dermot let loose upon 26, Gibraltar Street.
I had evidence that first night of another passion in Dermot’s life. Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden had gone to bed when we came in from the workshop. They always went early. Dermot took a candle and preceded me up the stairs to our room. He had a way of moving with extraordinary stealth. I didn’t hear his hand on the knob before the door was open and there we were in the bedroom. He put the candle down on a chest-of-drawers and began at once to undress. I stood looking about me in the unfamiliar roughly comfortable room. The light of the candle fell upon a carved frame that hung on the wall. I guessed that the carving was Dermot’s work. There was a harp with broken strings, and there were shamrock leaves sprouting round the foot of a gallows. It was a strange, moving bit of work. The frame was round a piece of parchment on which three names were inscribed in red ornamental lettering. I read them aloud: Allen, Larkin, O’Brien.
Dermot was already in bed. “Ever heard of them?” he asked. I turned at the strange harshness of his voice and saw that he was sitting up, his eyes glinting green in the candlelight.
“No,” I said.
“You’ll hear about them some day. They were the Manchester Martyrs. God damn England. Put out the candle.”
3
I shall not write much of the five years that passed over my head in Ancoats. They were happy years, as I have said, and they were profitable years. At the heart of them remains in my imagination the O’Riorden kitchen, and particularly the O’Riorden kitchen on winter nights. The chirping fire, the red cloth on the table, the lamp hanging by a chain above it, the heavy curtains drawn across the window, and the thick rag mat under foot: all these elements of that interior have pierced deeply into my mind as the trappings of a way of life that was solid, unambitious and good. It was not long before I was taking my turn with Mr. O’Riorden in the readings from Dickens. On most evenings Dermot would quietly disappear, and the rustling of the fire, the click of Mrs. O’Riorden’s needles, and the solemn voice of the clock would be the only sounds to accompany our voyage with Magwich down the river or our breathless participation in that night of flood and fury that cast Steerforth upon the Yarmouth sands at the feet of David Copperfield. We would usually still be hard at it when, towards ten o’clock, Dermot would come in from his shed, his long hand brushing the sawdust from his coat, his long eyebrows quizzically raised as he asked: “Still at it? Why don’t you learn to do something?”
He was all for doing, was Dermot, and in the course of the long walks which it became our custom to take together on Sundays he would sing of the time when his doing would be so effective that he would have a fine showroom in the heart of Manchester and everybody who knew what was what would come to him for beds and chairs and tables.
Grand days those were, walking in the flat green Cheshire countryside or upon the dark moors scarred with screes and gullies that we reached by taking a train to some Derbyshire station and then setting out whither we would. We would lie upon the purple heather with the blue sky above us and the sound of water tinkling in our ears, and Dermot would break the silence to damn England and to blether by the yard about Cuculain and the Dark Rosaleen and Davitt and Wolfe Tone.
“’Tis a throw-back ye are, Dermot,” old O’Riorden would say if one of these outbursts took place in the house. “It’s because ye’ve never seen Ireland that it’s got ye by the nose. ’Tis a stinking, starving little country that I’m glad to be out of.”
And Dermot would not answer, but his pale eyes would light up with their green flecks as on those nights when he came home late from some secret Irish conventicle with a flush to his pallid cheek and his fists clenched to show the knuckles white under the skin. If the old people were gone to bed and I were sitting up alone, he would say nothing of the business he had been at, but would rave of the old Ireland that was a land of saints and scholars, and, what meant more to him, of craftsmen and artificers who wrought in silver and in gold and precious stones. “If ever I have a son,” he said one night, “I’ll dedicate him to Ireland.”
He had the better chance to catch me for his sermons because more and more I took to staying up when Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden were gone to bed and getting on with my reading. That little kitchen library contained the whole of Dickens and of Thackeray, of George Eliot and the Brontës, a series of books called Great English Poets, and the plays of Shakespeare, which I had never embarked on with Mr. Oliver. I went through the lot like some base and indiscriminate drunkard to whom drink is
drink, whether it be dregs or vintage. And there was not much that you could call dregs on O’Riorden’s shelves.
Five good and happy years, and I didn’t spend them in the service of Mr. Summerway. It was clear from the first that I was wasting my time there, for was it not my will to be rich, and how could I hope for riches in a situation where the next step up was occupied by the young and healthy Sayers who seemed set for half a century?
During those five years I worked in two other cotton houses, and in a shipping office, and in a draper’s shop, and in an insurance office, but nowhere did I see that chance for a swift and spectacular ascent which was what I wanted. I began to be plagued, too, with an itch for fame as well as wealth, and it was inevitable that, as reading occupied so much of my time, I should think of writing as fame’s portal.
I was seventeen years old when I sat down on a winter night in the cold bedroom of 26, Gibraltar Street and, using the freezing marble slab of the washstand for a writing-table, embarked upon a novel whose rich perspectives faded away into the distances of my mind clothed in all the circumstances of a Copperfield or Newcome.
That evening was notable because it was the beginning of long, gruelling work, and it was notable, too, because that was the first time I saw Sheila Nolan. I found that all the bright ideas that filled my head were spectres which retreated as I advanced upon them. They wouldn’t be pinned down. It was a barren and humiliating evening. At nine o’clock Mrs. O’Riorden came to the foot of the stairs and shouted out to me: “Come down now, Bill. You’ll be clemmed wi’ cold up there. There’s a cup of tea waiting for you.”
My Son, My Son Page 3