And then—the magic of the man!—without warning we would, as I say, get up one morning to find my mother in her fawn rain-coat (her only coat), and hat, ourselves being pulled into coats too. A cabby and his horse would be coughing together outside the house and the next thing we knew we were driving to an underground station and to a new house in a new part of London, to the smell of new paint, new mice dirts, new cupboards, and to race out into a new garden to see if there were any trees and start, in our fashion to wreck the garden and make it the byword of the neighbourhood. The aggravating thing was that my mother was always crying in the cabs we took; and then my father would begin to sing in his moving bass voice:
Oh dry those tears
Oh calm those fears
Life will be brighter tomorrow.
Or, if he was exasperated with her, it would be
Tell me the old, old story
For I forget so soon.
I look back on these early years and chiefly remember how crowded and dark these houses were and that, after Uxbridge, there is always a nasty smell, generally of sour breadcrumbs at the edges of the seats of chairs, the disgusting smell of young children, after my sister and youngest brother were born. And there was the continual talk of rudeness. It was rooted in our very name for we soon learned that Pritchett was the same as Breeches for other children; one polite little boy called my mother Mrs Trousers because he had gathered that “breeches” was rude. Mother—and especially her mother, Gran—were the sources of a mysterious prurience. Gran liked chamber-pot humour and was almost reverent about po’s, mentioning that Aunt Short said that the best thing for the complexion was to wash one’s face in “it”—and good for rheumatism too. The bottom was the most rude thing we had, and, in consequence, the Double U. Rudeness became almost mystical if we caught Gran on the Double U when she left the door unlocked. Girls were rude because of their drawers; women, because of their long skirts, and more rude than men because they had so much more to cover. To crawl under a table and lift the hem of a skirt was convulsingly rude. At certain times Mother and Father were rude—not when she was in bed and her astonishing titty-bottles slipped out of her nightdress, like a pair of follies; but when she and Father went for a walk together and we walked behind them. We felt that it was rude to see a marriage walking about in front of the neighbours. Granda and Grandma Pritchett were never rude; but Mother was rude in herself—she wore “bloomers” and often “showed” them—but Father, on his own, never. I was ashamed for years of a photograph of us children. The corner of my sister’s silk dress had lodged on my knee as I sat next to her. I was rude.
One thing became noticeable in our removals. Very often my father and mother went to different destinations—she to the new house while my father and I would find ourselves at Euston station in the middle of the night. I was off by the midnight train to my grandfather’s in Repton and later to Sedbergh, to be away in the north for weeks or even months. My brother, it seemed, was off to Ipswich to stay with my mother’s sister, Ada. My sister and baby brother were at home. At one time I found myself sitting on the carrier of my father’s bicycle travelling from Nottingham to Derby. Another time I remember travelling in a hansom to Paddington and yet again standing one winter’s morning beside the driver of a horse tram down Tooley Street on a roundabout journey via Tower Bridge to King’s Cross. So began my love of change, journeys and new places. As many London children do, I skilfully lost myself in the streets and was twice picked up by the police. Most of these journeys which my father thoughtfully provided were, as I say, to the north. Repton I scarcely remember; but to Sedbergh, Kirbymoorside and Appleton-le-Moors I went again and again. We would get out of the night train, my father and I, at a junction near Kendal, at the gateway through the mountains to the Scottish border, cross the lines and take the little train to Sedbergh, that neat town of grey stone lying under the bald mountain I thought was called the Berg. The horse brake would take us up the main street, following a herd of cows. By the Manse and chapel, Granda was waiting. In the distance, on her whitened doorstep and close to a monkey-puzzle tree, stood Grandma in her starched white apron, her little pale iced-cake face and her glasses glittering. I remember an arrival when I was six. My grandmother would not let me into her clean house until she looked me over.
“Eeh Walter, for shame, t’lad’s buttons are off his jersey, his breeches have a hole in them. I’m raight vexed with your Beatie, letting a son of hers come up with his stockings in holes and his shoes worn through. Eeh, he looks nowt but a poor little gutter boy. For shame, Walter. For shame, Victor. I lay you’ve been playing in the London muck. I dassn’t show you to the neighbours. Nay, look at his breeches, Willyum.”
“Mother made them.” I stuck up for Mother, not for her sake but because of the astonishing material she used—mostly curtains from our house. Nothing covering a window, a table or a sofa was safe from my mother’s scissors when the sewing fit was on her. “I’ll get those old curtains down.” She was an impatient woman.
My grandmother took me inside, undressed me in the hall and held the breeches up and looked at them.
“Eeh Willyum, come here. They’re not stitched. They’re just tacked. T’lad’ll be naked in ’t street.”
It was true. Mother’s slapdash tacking often let us down.
On these visits, the minister would be having a sarcastic argument with his son about the particular God of the moment, for Father had left the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Wesleyans, the Methodists in turn, being less and less of a Jehovah man and pushing his way—it turned out—towards the Infinite. He was emerging from that pessimism which ate at his Victorian elders. The afternoon bus came and he went. Up the back step of the station brake he skipped, to pick up a couple of hampers of traveller’s samples in Manchester. I was glad to be rid of the family and scarcely thought of my mother or my brother and sister for weeks. Here was what I was made for: new clothes, new shirts, new places, the new life, jam tarts, Eccles cakes, seed-cakes, apple puffs and Yorkshire pudding. My grandparents looked at each other and then at me with concern for my character. I did not know that almost every time we moved house Father had lost his job or was swinging dangerously between an old disaster and a new enterprise, that he was being pursued by people to whom he owed money, that furniture had “gone back” or new unpaid-for furniture had “come in.” I did not know that my mother wept because of this, even as she slyly concealed, clenched in her fingers a half sovereign that some kind neighbour had given her. And I remember now how many times, when my father left in the morning for his work, she barred his way at the door or screamed at him from the gate, “Walt, Walt, where’s my money?” But I did see that here in Sedbergh there was domestic peace.
It is a small old town smelling of sheep and cows, with a pretty trout beck running through it under wooded banks. The fells, cropped close by sheep, smelling of thyme and on sunny days played on by the shadows of the clouds, rise steeply behind the town and from the top of them one sees the austere system of these lonely mountains running westward to the Pikes of the Lake District and north to the border. One is almost in Westmorland and, not far off, one sees the sheepwalks of Scott’s The Two Drovers, the shepherd’s road to Scotland. The climate is wet and cold in winter; the town is not much sheltered and day after day there will be a light, fine drizzle blowing over from Westmorland and the Irish Sea. When it begins people say “Ay, it’s dampening on.” These people are dour but kindly.
Yorkshire is the most loved of all the many places of my childhood. I was sent to my first school, the village school at the top of the town, up the lane from the Manse garden—it is just as it was when I was a child sixty years ago. The school sat in two classes and, I suppose, each class had about forty or fifty boys and girls, the girls in pinafores and long black or tan stockings. Douthwaite, Louthwaite, Thistlethwaite, Braithwaite, Branthwaite were the common surnames. The children spoke a dialect that was hard to understand. They came from farms and cottages,
both sexes brisk and strenuous. We sat in three tiers in the class-room, the upper one for bigger children. While I was doing pothooks and capital D’s from a script, the others were taught sums. Being a London child with a strange accent I began to swank, particularly to the girls. One who sat with me in the front offered to show me her belly if I lowered my own breeches. I did so, being anxious to show her my speciality—a blind navel, for the cord had been so cut that my navel was closed. In her opinion—and that of others—this was “wrong” and foretold an early death because no air could get inside me. This distinction made me swank more. She did not keep her part of the bargain, neither did any of the other girls in Sedbergh. She put up her hand and told teacher. This was the first of many painful lessons, for I instantly loved girls.
This incident was reported to the Manse. Also a scuffle or two in the school yard, being caught peeing over a wall to see how far we could go, with a lot of village lads, and a small burglary I got into with a village boy who persuaded me to slip into an old woman’s cottage and steal some Halma pieces from her desk. We lied about this. My grandfather, waiting to catch me naked in the bath tub, gave me a spanking that stung for hours. I screamed at him and said that I hoped he would be run over by the London express at the level-crossing the next time he crossed the line at the Junction. More spanking. I was removed from the school because the neighbours were talking. I was surprised for I was a pious little boy, packed with the Ten Commandments and spotless on Sundays: the farmers’ boys, the blacksmiths’ sons and all the old wheelwrights, tree fellers, shepherds thought I was a townee and a softie. I would never be able to herd sheep, shoe or ride a horse, use a pickaxe or even work in a woollen mill. My secret was that I was going to be a preacher like my grandfather; he had begun teaching me Latin, pointing out the Latin words on a penny—fidei defensor. I was to be defender (with spears and guns if necessary) of the faith, “prepared to receive cavalry.” For years I thought this and Calvary were the same thing.
The Manse at Sedbergh smelled of fruit and was as silent as church and had even churchy furniture in yellow oak, most of it made by country craftsmen, who in a fit of fancy, might carve, say, acorns or leaves all round the edge of a table. There was no sound but the tick tock of the grandfather clock. Everything was polished, still and clean. One slept in a soft feather bed and woke to see the mist low down on the waist of the Berg. On the old brick wall of the garden my grandfather grew his plums and pears, and in the flower-beds his carnations, his stock, his roses and his sweet-williams; and under the wall flowed a little stream from the mountains.
It was a kind, grave house. My grandparents were in their early fifties. For my grandmother cleanliness was the first passion. Whenever I stayed in my first years with her she bathed me in a zinc tub before the kitchen fire and was always scrubbing me. Once she tried to remove a mole from my nose, thinking it was a speck of tar. For two days, on and off, she worked at it with soap, soda, pumice and grit and hard brushes, exclaiming all the time like Lady Macbeth; while my grandfather growled “Let it bide, you’re spreading his nose all over his face.” He had a genial sadistic touch, for he loved to point to a scar on the tip of my nose which seemed to shine like a lamp and make me ridiculous; and also to say that my nose was the nearest thing to an elephant’s foot he had ever seen. He enjoyed making me angry. It was Yorkshire training.
Grandma always kept her white hair in curlers until a late hour in the afternoon, when she changed into one of her spotted blue dresses. The only day on which she looked less than neat was Monday. On this terrible day she pinned a man’s cloth cap to her hair, kirtled a rough skirt above her knees, put on a pair of wooden clogs and went out to the scullery to start the great weekly wash of sheets, pillow-cases, towels, table-cloths and clothes. They were first boiled in a copper, then she moved out to a wash-tub by the pump in the cobbled yard and she turned the linen round and round with the three-legged wooden “dolly”—as tall as myself—every so often remarking for her neighbours to hear that her linen was of better quality, better washed, whiter and cleaner than the linen of any other woman in the town; that the sight of her washing hanging on the line—where my grandfather had to peg and prop it—would shame the rest of the world and the final ironing be a blow to all rivals. The house smelled of suds and ironing. Her clogs clattered in the yard. But, sharp at five o’clock she changed as usual and sat down to read the British Weekly.
On Tuesday, she made her first baking of the week. This consisted of different kinds of bread and I watched it rise in its pans to its full beauty before the fire; on Thursday, she made her second baking, concentrating less on bread than on pies, her Madeira cake, her seed-cake, her Eccles cakes, her puffs, her lemon-curd or jam tarts and tarts of egg “custard,” operations that lasted from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon once more. The “bake” included, of course, the scouring of pans and saucepans which a rough village girl would help her with. At the end, the little creature showed no sign of being tired, but would “lay” there was no better cook in the town than herself and pitied the cooking of her sisters.
On Wednesdays she turned out the house. This cleaning was ferocious. The carpets were all taken up and hung on a line, my grandfather got out a heavy stick to beat them while she stood beside him saying things like “Eeh Willyum, I can’t abide dirt.” There was some nasty talk among the Congregationalists in Sedbergh about my grandfather’s carpet-beating; they got their own back for the boasting of my grandma and some said out loud that he was obviously not the class of man to be teaching the word of God in that town. (Forty years later when I went back to the town after his death, one or two old people still spoke in a shocked way of their working-class minister who was under the thumb of his “stuck-up” wife. That came of a man’s marrying above himself.)
After the carpets, the linoleum was taken up and Grandma was down on her knees scrubbing the floor boards. Then came hours of dusting and polishing.
“Woman,” Granda often said on Wednesdays, standing very still and thundery and glaring at her, “lay not up your treasure on earth where moth and dust doth corrupt.”
“Eeh Willyum,” she would reply, “wipe your boots outside. Ah can’t abide a dirty doormat. Mrs So-and-so hasn’t whitened her step since Monday.”
And once more she would settle down as pretty as a picture to an evening, making another rag rug or perhaps crocheting more and more lace for her dresses, her table-centres and her doilies. By the time she was eighty years old she had stored away several thousand of these doilies, chests full of them; and of course they were superior to the work of any other woman in the country. In old age, she sent boxes of them to her younger son who had emigrated to Canada, thinking he might be “in want.”
I remember a tea for Sunday-school teachers at the Manse. They came, excited young men and bouncing young women who went out in the fields and trees along the beck to see who could collect and name the largest number of different species of wild flower in an hour. An older woman won with fifty-seven different kinds. We got back to my grandmother’s parlour where the sun shone through the little square lights of her windows, to see one of my grandmother’s masterpieces, a state tea laid on the table. The scones, the tea-cakes, Eccles cakes, jam tarts, iced tarts, her three or four different kinds of cake, sultana, Madeira, seed and jammed sponge, her puffs and her turn-overs were set out in all their yellows, browns, pinks and, as usual, in her triumph, my grandmother was making a pettish little mouth, “laying” that “nowt like it” would be seen on any table in the town. The company stood reverently by their chairs and then, to my disgust, they broke out into a sung grace, conducted by the eldest of the teachers, each taking parts, bass and tenor, soprano and contralto, repeating their variations for what seemed to me a good twenty minutes before setting to. To my wonder—for I had been nicely brought up by my grandmother—the eldest teacher who was a very old man with the big hands of a labourer, tipped his tea into his saucer, blew on it and drank.
“Look at the man,” I shouted. “He’s being rude.”
There was a silence. The old man was angry. Grandma was vexed. There was a dispute about whether I should be told to leave the room. One of the girls saved me. But the old man kept coming back to it and it was the whole subject of the tea-party, and for days the minister and his wife had the matter over with me. If that was “London manners,” the old man growled when he left, he didn’t want owt of them. Such slights are never forgotten in the north; they go all round the town and add to its obdurate wars. The story was reported to my father in London and was brought up indignantly year after year. To think that a boy, a relation of the minister’s, too, and already known to have exposed himself in school, should say a thing like that. One experience I feared to tell them. That day of the flower hunt, I had found a beautiful white flower like a star growing near the river. I had never seen a white flower so silky and star-like, in its petals, and so exquisite. I picked it, smelled it and dropped it at once. It stank. The smell was not only rank, it suggested rottenness and a deep evil. It was sin itself. And I hurried away, frightened, from the river, not daring to mention it and I never walked through that field again. For many years I thought of this deceit. I did not know this flower was the wild garlic, the most evocative of our aphrodisiacs, the male to the female musk.
The Pritchett Century Page 4