by John Moore
Old Jim introduced us to the dawn and the dusk, taught us much about walking in the woods at night, about traps and nets and ferrets, and above all about birds. For although he caught and caged them, inflicting great cruelty without even understanding that he was being cruel, he loved birds and knew more about their songs, their nests, and their habits than many naturalists who write books. Jim couldn’t write at all; in my uncle’s office, if it were necessary for him to sign anything, he would explain, “I’m no scholard,” and make a cross on the paper: Jim Meadows, his mark. Yet he made a lot of money, partly out of the canaries, which were famous songsters, and partly out of antique furniture, which he could price more surely than most dealers. Whatever he made he drank; and when he was drunk he would go off and commit an assault upon the pusillanimous husband of his mistress, adding injury to insult.
A professional fisherman called Bassett was another of our holiday schoolmasters. He got well paid by the gentry for taking them out in his boat and showing them the likeliest places for sport, yet he would often sacrifice the chance of earning ten shillings to spend the afternoon with us and to teach us what he knew. He taught us one thing that nobody else could: he taught us to be quiet. Chatter and sudden movement he abominated; he was the stillest person I have ever known, as still as the cat waiting for the mouse, as the stilt-legged heron fishing in the shallows. When he rowed the boat you could not hear the splash of the oars nor the creaking of the rowlocks; whenever he moved his action was slow, calculated and completely silent. He was a hard taskmaster; he would never let us rest our rods on the side of the boat—“Birmigum fishing,” he called that: the city dwellers’ Sunday afternoon out. Always we must hold them, although they were much too heavy for us, in aching arms until we got a bite. If the float bobbed, there must be no exclamation, no schoolboy’s yelp of delight when the fish was hooked. And when we caught one it must be killed silently and swiftly—“kill it as if you were a murderer,” was his grim and blood-chilling instruction—lest it flap about on the floor boards and drive the others away. He had never read The Compleat Angler but old Izaak’s motto, “Study to be quiet” was his also.
When fishing was over, he would take us home to tea. His house smelled strongly of napthaline; for whereas Jim Meadows’ was full of live birds—there you might share your bread-and-butter with a pecking magpie—Bassett’s birds were all stuffed. He was the local taxidermist; and he had a strange limitation for although he could skin a bird or an animal both quickly and cleverly—he taught us the trick of it—he was absolutely incapable of stuffing them in a lifelike way. To sit for long among the birds and beasts in Bassett’s back room was to indulge in a palæontologist’s nightmare; those finches, gulls, hawks, kingfishers, jays did not belong to the present, but to some dark and remote past, they were the prototypes, the remote amorphous ancestors of our birds, those badgers, squirrels and stoats had a lizard quality, they belonged to the forests of the Coal Age rather than to our English woodland. They all suffered from the same kind of distortion, as if you looked at them in a concave mirror—for they were all to a ridiculous degree attenuated. They looked as if they had been starved for months and then for weeks painfully extended on a rack. In particular the stoats and weasels, by nature tenuous, at Bassett’s hands became almost eel-like; they were dreadful. And there was a heron with its long thin neck stretched out so that it looked like a pterodactyl.
Yet Bassett was proud of these creatures of his fantasy. He never tired of showing them off to us. In particular he was proud of a peregrine falcon which he had shot himself. If you have ever seen a peregrine, or any other kind of hawk, you will know that the most striking thing about it is the beauty of its eyes. But the artificial eyes which Bassett had seen fit to insert in his peregrine’s head could not by any stretch of imagination be said to resemble a hawk’s; they might perhaps have looked realistic in a stuffed goose. The effect was too terrible for words. Bassett had a box of “assorted eyes” which he had bought from a dealer; and he pulled them out at random, without respect for the size or nature of the creature he was stuffing. In consequence most of his birds had the appearance of bleary drunkards or squint-eyed lechers.
But we always enjoyed having tea at his house, although to Mrs. Bassett the parlour must have seemed a Chamber of Horrors indeed. There were fishing-rods everywhere, with hooks dangling down haphazard so that they were likely to catch you as you passed by. A damp fishing-net smelling of waterweed leaned against the table. A bucket of live-bait provided a hazard in the doorway. On the floor lay a basket with half a dozen moribund eels. A side-table was littered with scalpels, scissors, skulls, skins, and cakes of arsenical soap, to say nothing of a stick of cyanide for taking wasps’ nests. (Yet Bassett’s six grubby children all survived.) There were sure to be wasps’ grubs, maggots, and worms in tins, and pike-spinners with more random hooks to catch the unwary.
And elsewhere, all over the room, on the mantelpiece, on bookshelves, wherever there was space, the frightful creatures of Bassett’s myth extended snake-like necks and stared with glazed and terrible and dissipated eyes. On the hearth two parodies of badgers sat up and begged. In a glass case were squirrels on a tree-trunk, a kind of set piece which one might describe as an extravaganza on the theme of squirrels. Over the fireplace a crested grebe, with outspread wings like a Phoenix, looked backwards from its tortured neck and gaped with open beak at the wall.
The Scholar Fisherman
Bassett taught us the hard discipline of angling; Mr. Chorlton soon taught us its beauty, when he took us up the river on calm summer evenings and showed us how to throw a fly. He was careful not to suggest to us that this method of fishing was necessarily superior to any other, so we grew up without any silly snobbery about floats and worms; instead we took the sensible view that the purpose of fishing is to have fun. We were equally happy, therefore, whether we were catching bleak with house-flies, or watching the long black porcupine-quill when we fished for tench and bream, trolling for pike in winter, or sitting, oh! so quietly, in the sternsheets of Mr. Chorlton’s boat while with exquisite grace he swished his shining split-cane rod and sent out the cobwebby line towards the dark eddy under the overhanging willows.
It was Mr. Chorlton’s custom (anathema to Bassett) while fishing to talk. He would chide the reluctant fishes with a quotation from Shakespeare, ask the favour of the immortal gods in Latin, curse a broken cast in Homeric Greek. He never talked down to us. If we didn’t understand what he said we could always ask the meaning of it. And so we did, with the result that we learned a great many wise sayings in a far more pleasant way than if we had been sitting at a schoolroom desk.
The Young Alchymist
I left prep school in a blaze of glory. Illicitly and in secret, like an alchymist of old, I was conducting a complicated chemical experiment in an empty form-room when the bell rang for chapel. The experiment was somewhat empirical; it consisted of mixing together a number of different substances to see if they would explode. The chapel was next door to the form-room, and boys and masters had to pass through the form-room in order to get to it. Panic-stricken, I hid my concoctions in the grate, wiped my hands on the seat of my trousers, and wearing an expression of great piety went in to my prayers. The Headmaster entered, we knelt down, and he began to pray. He had got as far as “Forgive us our trespasses” when a tremendous explosion rent the air. The whole building shuddered; bits of plaster fell off the ceiling; and soon wisps of smoke drifted across the aisle, smelling acridly of phosphorus. The Headmaster finished the prayer and led us out in silence through the shattered form-room. The grate was blown clean out, and with it most of the chimney. Even in my terror of the consequences I could not help reflecting with justifiable pride that my experiment had succeeded.
But it was the end of term, and my last term, so the consequences were not very serious. I stuffed my trousers with brown paper, but the precaution was unnecessary. The Headmaster had delegated my punishment to Mr. Chorlton, who looked at
me sternly and asked: “When you mixed those chemicals together were you trying to prove anything or were you just hoping they’d explode?”
I thought it safest to be honest. “Hoping they’d explode, sir.”
“Good. I was afraid you might have had some serious scientific purpose. If so I’d have beaten you. The educational value of chemistry is almost exactly equal to that of a jigsaw puzzle. Make stinks for fun, but if you want to learn things, stick to Virgil. You can go.”
Next day I had to see the Headmaster himself, to say goodbye. This was a ceremony at which, it was understood, we should be told the Facts of Life. We who were leaving all waited anxiously outside the Head’s door and went in one by one. It was terrifying; we vaguely expected some sort of a revelation. What appalling mystery was about to be revealed to us? A boy came out snivelling. Our terror increased. What dreadful initiation went on behind that closed door? But when I got inside the Headmaster merely delivered a dissertation on the subject of dirty jokes. I didn’t know any dirty jokes, so this rather missed its mark. However, I pretended to snivel when I came out; it seemed to be expected; and upon the face of the boy whose turn it was to enter I was pleased to see the appropriate expression of fear.
Anarchic Interlude
From the glorious free-and-easy prep school I went to a hateful public school where I found I was expected in summer to play a regimented kind of cricket instead of collecting butterflies and in winter to go for compulsory runs, curiously termed “Voluntaries,” instead of watching birds. I discovered that my form was still reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Cæsar’s De Bello Gallico, which I knew practically by heart; so I decided to do no work until the tasks set for preparation became more interesting.
Unfortunately Mr. Chorlton, who had instilled into me a love of the classics, had also communicated to me his own contempt for mathematics; so I decided to give up all mathetical studies also. I remained in the same form, called Upper Shell B, for three years, which was a record for the school.
But when I was not engaged in avoiding work or in escaping the consequences of having done none (exercises which required more application and ingenuity than I should have expended on the work itself) I read everything I could lay hands on, from Kipling to Shelley, from Surtees to Keats. I read all the plays of Shakespeare, including Timon of Athens; the poetry of Meredith and the prose of Thomas Love Peacock; the whole of Man and Superman, and Tristram Shandy four times. I even read The Golden Asse; it was discovered in my desk and confiscated as “indecent literature.” Two Elephant-hawk caterpillars, and a lot of Burnet moth cocoons, were also found in the desk and confiscated at the same time.
I became a kind of anarchist. On O.T.C. field days I deserted, hid in trees, and looked for birds’ nests. I refused to play football, and went fishing for perch in a farmer’s pond instead. As a punishment I was sent for long runs; this pleased me, because instead of running I concealed myself in a chalk quarry and looked for fossils. In form I never even attempted to solve the problems of Euclid, but instead decorated the foolscap sheet with maps of Elmbury, its confluent streams and rivers, its rabbit-warren back-streets, its roads and lanes which led to a dozen delightful villages, all infallibly drawn from memory. And on another sheet I made a calendar of all the dreary days, and blacked them out one by one, and counted daily the remainder, until the holidays came round again.
Release from this anarchic and unhappy existence came unexpectedly before I was seventeen. My uncle was old and likely soon to retire; his promising sons had been killed in the war; the “family tradition” would be broken unless I joined the firm. It was suggested to me that if I liked to go into his office I could leave school at once. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the office; but I passionately hated school, and I left it immediately, unregretful and unregretted.
The Facts of Life
During my last summer holidays a second attempt was made to teach me the Facts of Life. The vicar, who was still borrowing wildly in order that he might be still more wildly generous, presented me with three expensive books and a spinning-reel and unexpectedly asked me to go fishing with him. This surprised me, for I didn’t know he was an angler; and I didn’t want to go, because it was the day of Elmbury Mop Fair. This was Elmbury’s annual saturnalia, roundabouts were set up in the streets, and stalls which sold sticky gingerbread, and booths where you could have your fortune told, or see the Fattest Woman in the World, and the Hairiest, and the smallest Pigmy, and the Web-footed Man, and the Nameless Delights of Paris. I should have liked to have spent the afternoon at the Fair, visiting these marvels and shying at coconuts; but it would be impolite to refuse the parson’s invitation, so I rigged him up a rod, dug some worms, and we set out. It was soon apparent that the man had never fished before; because he could not bring himself to impale his worm, and I had to do it for him. We sat in silence and watched our motionless floats. It began to rain. He cleared his throat. I had a terrible premonition that he was going to ask me if I knew the Facts of Life; and sure enough a moment later he began:
“Forgive me asking, dear boy … but your father being dead … as a great friend of your mother … and your parish priest … I feel it my responsibility. …”
I was sorry for the poor man in his embarrassment, so I told him airily, yes, I knew all: my schoolmasters, before I left, had told me all the Facts of Life. He appeared relieved; and a moment later he suggested that as the fish weren’t biting we might as well go home.
I had my revenge for my wasted afternoon. I made him take off his own worm; and he was nearly sick. That evening, with Dick, Donald and Ted, I went to the Fair. We saw the Fat and the Hairy Women, the Pigmy, the Web-footed Man, and the Nameless Delights, which were so unimpressive that I have forgotten what they consisted of. We won armfuls of coconuts. We rode on the roundabouts and the swings and the cakewalk, we slid down the chute, and then stood at the bottom to watch three little wenches, with their skirts up to their middles, come tumbling down after us. We lifted them to their feet and took them on the swings. We bought them gingerbreads and sticky sweets. One was blonde, one was brunette, and one was redheaded; and later, when we left the crowded noisy streets and the weird white light of the naphtha flares, she taught me much more about Life than the parson had succeeded in doing.
Business Man
The time had now come for me to be articled to my uncle and to go into his office.
I was a lanky youth of seventeen. I had an astonishing store of knowledge about a number of things which were scarcely relevant to a commercial career. I could read the New Testament in Greek and recite much of the Georgics from memory. I knew the names of most wild flowers, could recognise most butterflies and moths and tell you their life-histories, knew the birds’ songs, their nests, and eggs, and had read the whole of Geikie’s Geology. I could sometimes catch fish when wise old anglers couldn’t; could shoot, ride a horse, sail a boat. I had read without discrimination every novel, play or biography I could lay hands on, and I swallowed poetry with the voracity of a sealion swallowing fish. My method (which makes me shudder to think of it now) was to obtain from the Public Library the collected works of some poet, Tennyson or Browning or Longfellow, and read the whole lot, slap through, from page one to the end. In this fashion I had read the whole of The Dynasts when I was sixteen.
With these qualifications I set out to become an auctioneer.
Part Three
Going, Going
(1924-1927)
Grandstand for Sociologists—The Office—Words—Foot-and- Mouth —The Invisible Invasion—The Wind Blows Cold—The Idle Apprentices—Come Lassies and Lads—Satellite Villages—Songs at the Salutation—Market Day—Conversation-Piece—Market-Peartness and Illiteracy—Economics of Farming—To Be a Farmer’s Boy— Midnight Steeplechase—The Long View—Orchards—The Blow a-Blowing—Timber—Pubs—Roadhouse and Bar Parlour—Furniture Sales—The Crooked Craftsman—You’ve Got to Leave the Bed —Farewell to the Office—Turkey Trouble—We be Getting Old
— Falstaff he is Dead—Tempora mutantur—Property Sale—Live and Dead Farming Stock—Tenant-Right—Ave atque Vale—The Pattern
Grandstand for Sociologists
The profession is not very highly regarded, as professions go; but if any earnest young student with a B.Sc. and little experience of life asks me the best way to begin the study of sociology I shall suggest at least two years in the office of an auctioneer.
Consider the opportunities provided by such a course. The auctioneer’s job brings him in touch with every class and person; we are all, at some time in our lives, landlords or tenants, buyers or sellers. It gives him the entry, from time to time, into every house in his district, great or small. So does the doctor’s profession, or the parson’s; but the doctor sees people only when they are ill, or when they think they are ill, and when the parson visits people they are either on their best behaviour or on the defensive. The auctioneer sees them at their best and worst; and usually at the time when some crisis, financial or otherwise, has disrupted their lives. He sees them when the head of the house has died; when their little business has gone smash; when they are in arrears with their rent; when the landlord has given them notice to quit; when the bum-bailie is seizing their furniture for debt; when they go bankrupt. He sees them when they are compelled by circumstances to sell their most precious possessions, and when they are covetous to buy the possessions of their neighbour. He sees homes set up, and homes broken; he sees poor men get rich and rich men ruined. He meets man in all his moods and all his manifestations: in sorrow, in avarice, in courage, in greed, in good fortune and bad, in the shadow of death itself.