The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  The general portrait of the country people of Haworth which is given by Mrs Gaskell in her life of Charlotte Brontë, very closely fitted the character of my Yorkshire relations if one allows for the taming effects of lower middle-class gentility. Haworth-like tales were common among the Sawdons. They were proud, violent, egotistical. They had—according to your view—either a strong belief in the plain virtues or a rock-like moral conceit. Everything was black or white to them. They were blunt to your face, practical and unimaginative, kind yet iron-minded, homely and very hospitable; but they suspected good manners, they flayed you with their hard and ironical eyes. They were also frugal, close and calculating about money—they were always talking about “brass”—and they looked on outsiders with scorn. They were monosyllabic talkers but their silences concealed strong passions that (as Mrs Gaskell said) lasted for life, whether that passion was of love or hatred. Their friendship or their enmity was for ever. To listen to their talk was like listening to a fire crackling. They had no heroes. They were cautious and their irony was laconic. I was in the city of York soon after it was bombed in the last war and I said to a railway worker,

  “Well they didn’t destroy the Minster.”

  “Ay, they say as how Hitler says he’s going to be married there next May. But ah doan’t know …”

  With that last phrase dryly uttered he gave me a look as hard as steel.

  Year after year I went to Sedbergh to sit on the stool by my grandmother’s fire, staring at the pots that hung simmering on their shining chains over the coals, smelling the green country bacon and the rising bread. One day a boy from the famous Public School at Sedbergh was called in to tell me how many years it would be before I reached the verb “sum” in Latin and could enter the school and go for their terrible fifteen mile “runs” across the fells, the toughest schoolboy run in England. I often saw the boys slogging along near the ravine. This was one of the many schools I never went to.

  My grandfather’s home life was laborious and thrifty. Coals were bargained for in the summer and sacked down, carefully counted piece by piece, in a heap near the stone shed. He would then grade the pieces in sizes and (reverting to his brick-laying days), he would build them into a wall inside the shed. Each day he would collect, one by one, the various sizes of coal needed for an economical fire. They were small, slow burning fires, often damped down in order to save, but in the winters of valley fog or snow, we were thickly clad in Yorkshire wool and I remembered no cold. After his work in the house he had work to do in his garden also. He had to dig all of it. There were his vegetables and his raspberries which, in the ripe season, he sold at twopence a cup to the town. Notices saying, Thou Shalt Not Steal were placed on sticks on the wall by the school lane. He had little time or peace for his ministry; or opportunity for his secret vice: cigar smoking. The Congregationalists would not have tolerated tobacco smoking in their minister, any more than they would have stood for drinking, but I’ve known him drink a glass of strong home-brewed ale at an isolated farm and, as for the cigar, his habit was to sneak off to the petty or earth closet at the end of the garden, latch himself in with Bible and writing-paper, light up, take his ease and write his sermon. My grandmother was always frantic when he was out of her sight for a minute—she did her best to stop him going on his parish visits, for she would “lay” the men would be out at work and he would have to see the women, which raised her instant jealousy—and on his cigar days her delicate nose would sometimes catch the smell coming out of the top of the petty door. She would run down the garden and beat on the door with a yard-broom, shouting.

  “Willyum, Willyum, come out of that, you dirty man.”

  Sunday was his day. On this day my grandmother respected him and herself withdrew into a silent self-complacency as her Willyum prepared for the Christian rites. He had an early and a late service in the mornings, another in the afternoon and one in the evening. He prepared for the day in soldierly way, as for battle. He shaved so closely that there was generally a spot of blood on his chin and his cheeks were pale. His surplice was a disappointing, cotton affair, like a barber’s sheet—poor quality I came to think, shop-shoddy—as he set off across the gravel path to the chapel which made one side of his garden cold and damp. I was put into my Sunday best—sailor collar, vest that choked me, linen breeches that sawed at the crotch and cut me above the knees when I sat, legs dangling, swelling and aching in the pew; and my grandmother had on her best bonnet and costume. We smelled of new cloth, but she relieved this by soaking her handkerchief in Lily of the Valley and gave me a sniff of it. She also took smelling salts. Then comes the agony of sitting in those oaken pews and keeping my eyes fixed on Grandfather. What he says I never understand but he goes on and on for a long time. So do the hymns. There is the cheerful break when the plate goes round, the happiness of putting in a penny; and then there is the moment which makes me giggle—and at times (when my brother was with me), the joke was too much. My grandfather would give out notices and announce the sum of last Sunday’s collection, a sum like eight shillings and three pence halfpenny. (His living, by the way.) His voice is harsh, but what convulses me is his way of pronouncing the word halfpenny; he calls it, in curt northern fashion ha’penny with the broad “a”—“hah-pny.” I often tell my father of this later in London who points out I have no call to complain when, in pure Cockney I talk of a boy who lives “dahn ahr wy.”

  Back we go to cold beef for it is wicked to cook anything on Sundays—except Yorkshire pudding. This is sacred. Light as an omelette yet crisp in the outer foliations of what it would be indelicate to call crust, it has no resemblance to any of that heavy soggy fatty stuff known all over England and America by the name. Into it is poured a little gravy made of meat and not from some packaged concoction. One might be eating butterflies, so lightly does it float down; it is my grandmother’s form of poetry. Grandfather asks if I would like “a small bortion more” for Non-conformists often affected small changes of consonant, “p” becoming “b” and an “s” becoming a “z,” and then asks his wife what she thought of the sermon. The faithful always called themselves “uz,” the “z” separating them from sinners. Her reply is to ask if he noticed Mrs Somebody’s terrible new hat and to add that she didn’t think owt to the material of the new coat Mrs Somebody Else had dressed herself up in.

  The afternoon is more serious. I had no toys or games at my grandfather’s—nor did my father when he was a boy—and I did not miss them. There was enough in garden, country or the simple sight of things to keep me occupied and, for years, in my parents’ house the smell of toys seemed unpleasant and their disasters too distressing. One always thought of the money they cost. On Sundays at Sedbergh I was allowed into my grandfather’s study. It was a small room with a few hundred books in it, almost all sermons, and he would read to me some pious tale about, perhaps, a homeless orphan, driven to sleep on straw, in some shed in Manchester, surrounded by evil-doers. The boy resists starvation, and after a long illness, is rescued by benevolent middle-class people.

  When I tried to read these tales I found the words were too long and so I gazed at the green Berg, watched the cloud shadows make grey or blue faces on the grass, and the sheep nibbling there. The quiet and loneliness were exquisite to me; and it was pleasant to smell the print of my grandfather’s paper and hear him turn over the pages in such a silence. When I grew up the Christian God ceased to mean anything to me; I was sick of Him by the twenties; but if I think of a possible God some image of the Berg comes at once to my mind now, or of certain stones I remember in the ravine. To such things the heathen in his wisdom always bowed.

  I did not understand my grandfather’s sermons. My mother who had sat through many told me his manner was hard and monotonous and that he was one to whom hatred and the love of truth were very much the same thing, his belief being that truth is afflicting and unpleasant. He argued people into hell, not in the florid manner of the melodramatic hell-fire preachers who set the flames danc
ing so that in the end they became like theatre flames to the self-indulgent. My grandfather’s method was to send people to hell rationally, contemptuously and intellectually. He made hell curtly unattractive; he even made it boring. This was an error; later on, his congregations dwindled, for he offered no beanos of remorse, salvation or luxuriant ruin. He could not see that sin is attractive and that therefore its condemnation must be more voluptuous.

  Frankly the congregations expected an artist and they discovered instead a critic. They were puzzled. That enormous success in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester was not repeated. Grandfather was essentially an intellectual and some said—my parents among them—that his marriage to a vain, houseproud and jealous girl who never read anything in her life except the love serial in the British Weekly and who upset the ladies of his many chapels by her envies and boastings, was a disaster for an intellectual man. The Congregationalists invite their ministers and the news of her character got round. But how can one judge the marriages of others? There are families that are claustrophobic, that live intensely for themselves and are indifferent to the existence of other people and are even painfully astonished by it. His truculence in the Army was a symptom of solitary independence.

  The pious story of the Manchester orphan had one importance: for the first time I heard of the industrial revolution. This was real to the north-country people. We knew nothing about it in the commercial south. There were little mills in the valleys where my grandfather took me to see the mill girls at their machines. There were the tall chimneys of Leeds and York. One spoke of people, not by who they were, but by what they did. Their work defined them. Men who met at street corners in Sedbergh knew of strikes and labour wars; and my grandfather told me of masters and men with war-like relish. These stories were not told in terms of rights and wrongs very much, though my grandfather was radical enough; Carlyle’s Past and Present fitted his view. The stories were told with a pride in conflict itself. Hard masters were as much admired as recalcitrant workmen; the quarrel, the fight, was the thing. The fight was good because it was a fight. Granda’s youth was speaking when he told of this.

  The Ten Commandments, of course, came into my grandfather’s stories, particularly the commands to honour one’s parents—though of mine he clearly had a poor opinion—because that led to obedience; then stealing the old lady’s Halma pieces, the allure of apples, raspberries and Victoria plums. Finally murder. About murder he was vehement. It attracted him; he seemed to be close to it. I felt I must be close to it too. I had a younger brother whose goodness (I jealously knew) was palpable. How easily I could become Cain. To the question “Cain, where is thy brother Abel?” how glad I was that I could honestly reply “Uxbridge, near the canal,” though I had once tried to push him into it. Granda kept on year after year about murder. When I was nine or ten and the famous Crippen cut up his wife and buried her in his cellar, Granda made me study the case thoroughly. He drew a plan of the house and the bloody cellar, for me to reflect on. He had a dramatic mind.

  In the summer my grandparents took a holiday, paying for it out of a few preaching engagements. We took the train across Yorkshire to the North Riding. For the first week we would stay with my Great Uncle Arthur and his wife Sarah, who was my grandmother’s sister. After the placid small town life of Sedbergh, York was a shock. We were in an aristocratic yet industrial city. The relations were working-class people. The daughters of the tailor in Kirbymoorside were expectant heiresses in a small way, but both had married beneath them. Very contentedly too: the difference cannot have been very great and was bridged by the relative classlessness of the north—relative, I mean, to life in the south.

  We arrived at one of an ugly row of workers’ houses, with their doors on the street, close to the gas works, and the industrial traffic grinding by. A child could see that the minister and his wife thought themselves many cuts above their York relations. Great Uncle Arthur was a cabinet-maker in a furniture factory. The minister glittered blandly at him and Uncle Arthur looked as though he was going to give a spit on the floor near the minister with a manual worker’s scorn.

  Great Uncle Arthur was a stunted and bandy man, with a dark, sallow and strong boned face. He looked very yellow. He had a heavy head of wiry hair as black as coals, ragged eyebrows and a horrible long black beard like a crinkled mat of pubic hair. A reek of tobacco, varnish and wood-shavings come off him; he had large fingers with split unclean nails. The first thing he did when he got home from work was to put on a white apron, strap a pair of carpet knee-pads to his trousers, pick up a hammer or screw-driver and start on odd jobs round the house. He was always hammering something and was often up a ladder. His great yellow teeth gave me the idea he had a machine of some kind in his mouth, and that they were fit to bite nails; in fact, he often pulled a nail or two out of his mouth. He seemed to chew them.

  Uncle Arthur’s wife was Grandma’s eldest sister and in every way unlike her. She was tall, big boned, very white faced and hollow-eyed and had large, loose, laughing teeth like a horse’s or a skeleton’s which have ever since seemed to me the signs of hilarious good nature in a woman. Though she looked ill—breathing those fumes of the gas works which filled the house cannot have been very good for her—she was jolly, hard-working and affectionate. She and Uncle Arthur were notorious (in the family) for the incredible folly of adoring each other. She doted on her dark, scowling, argumentative, hammering little gnome: it seemed that two extraordinary sets of teeth had fallen in love with each other.

  For myself, Uncle Arthur’s parlour, Aunt Sarah’s kitchen and the small back yard were the attractions. The back yard was only a few feet square but he grew calceolarias there. It gave on to an alley, one wall of which was part of the encircling wall of the city. Its “Bars” or city gates, its Minster are the grandest in England and to Uncle Arthur who knew every stone in the place I owe my knowledge and love of it. One could go up the steps, only a few feet and walk along the battlements and shoot imaginary arrows from the very spot where the Yorkists had shot them in the Wars of the Roses; and one could look down on the white roses of York in the gardens near the Minster and look up to those towers where the deep bells talked out their phenomenal words over the roofs of the city. They moved me then; they move me still.

  Uncle Arthur’s house had a stuffy smell—the smell of the gas works and the railway beyond it was mixed with the odour of camphor and camphor wax. The rooms were poorly lit by gas jets burning under grubby white globes; air did not move easily, for there were heavy curtains in the narrow passage-way to the stairs. But the pinched little place contained Uncle’s genius and the smell of camphor indicated it. The cabinet-maker was a naturalist—he used to speak of Nature as some loud fancy woman he went about with and whom his wife had got used to. On the walls of his kitchen hung pretty cases of butterflies and also of insects with hard little bubble bodies of vermilion and green—creatures he had caught, killed and mounted himself. In the lower half of the kitchen window he had fixed a large glass case of ferns in which he kept a pet toad. You put a worm on the toad’s table—one of Uncle’s collection of fossils—and the spotted creature came out and snapped it up.

  The smell of camphor was strongest in the small front parlour. A lot of space in the window corner was taken up by another large glass case containing a stuffed swan. This enormous white bird, its neck a little crooked and sooty, was sitting on a nest of sticks and seemed to be alive, for every time a lorry or a train passed, it shook and—by it’s stony eye—with indignation. In two other corners there were cabinets containing Uncle’s collection of birds’ eggs; and on the mantelpiece was a photograph of Uncle being let down by a rope from the cliffs of Whitby where he was collecting eggs under a cloud of screaming gulls.

  Granda was the sedentary and believing man; Uncle was the sceptic and man of knowledge. He had been born very poor and had had next to no schooling. He told me he could not read or write until he was a grown man. A passion for education took him. He took to l
earning for its own sake and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged—I now see—to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last, he found it: he taught himself to read by using Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He revelled in it.

  “Look it up in Burton, lad,” he’d say when I was older. “What’s old Burton say?”

  He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favourite sentence:

  “Circumstances alter cases.”

  Burton was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation: it set him free of the tyranny of the Bible in chapel-going circles. There were all his relations—especially the minister—shooting texts at one another while Uncle Arthur sat back, pulled a nail or two out of his mouth and put his relatives off target with bits of the Anatomy. He had had to pick up odds and ends of Latin and Greek because of the innumerable notes in those languages, and a look of devilry came into his eyes under their shaggy black brows. On top of this he was an antiquarian, a geologist, a bicyclist and an atheist. He claimed to have eaten sandwiches on the site of every ruined castle and abbey in Yorkshire. He worshipped the Minster and was a pest to curators of museums and to librarians.