The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  My absorption in the leather trade went to comical lengths. Father had bought a fat encyclopaedia, second hand, and dated 1853; I discovered in it a full technical account of the tanning process. I decided to tan a skin myself. I got a small tank, brought home some shumac and then considered the process. First I had to get an animal and then skin it; then, either by pasting it on the flesh side with a depilatory, or letting it heat to the point of decay that is not injurious to the skin, I would have to scrape off the hair. There were superficial skins to remove. I would then have to place it in the proper liquids, having first transferred it for a time to a tank of fermented dog dung in order to soften it. And so on. The difficulty was to find an animal small enough. Our dog? Our cat? One of our rabbits? The thought sickened me. A mouse? There were plenty in the house. I set a trap and caught one. But it was pretty and the prospect of letting its skin sweat and removing the fur with my fingers repelled me. I gave up the idea.

  In my second year in the trade, in the summer holiday, I hired a bicycle and went up to Ipswich, stopping at a country tannery on the way. It belonged to the sad gentleman farmer. He gave me lunch and I showed off to his pretty daughter. After lunch he took me round the tannery. This was the life, I thought, as I walked round the pits: to be a country gentleman, marry this nice girl and become a tanner. There might be some interesting erotic social difficulties of the kind that occurred in John Halifax, Gentleman by Mrs Craik, a novel that fed my daydreams at this time. The pits were laid out like a chequer board and we walked between them. I was in the midst of this daydream when I slipped and I fell up to the neck into the cold filthy ooze of the pit. A workman hooked me out on his pit pole before I went under, for these pits are deep; I was rushed to a shed, stripped and hosed down. Stinking, I was taken back to the house, and dressed up in an assortment of clothes, including a shooting jacket much too large and a pair of football shorts belonging to the tanner’s ten-year-old son. The nice girl had left to laugh in her room.

  This was my baptism into the trade; now I think of it, the only baptism I have ever had.

  I was happier in my hours in the leather trade than I was at home; and strangely, I believe, the encouragement to think again of being a writer came from people in the trade. One or two of the customers saw the books I was reading on my desk and I discovered that many of these businessmen knew far more about literature than I did. There was the tycoon with his Flaubert—whom I did not read for years—there was Beale, the leather dresser, who recited Shakespeare at length, as we went through the skivers on the top floor; there was Egan, our foreman, a middle-aged and gentle man with a soft voice who, in between calling orders to the men and going over his weighing slips, would chat to me about Dickens and Thackeray. Once a month he would get blind drunk for a few days and then return, otherworldly and innocent, to have a bookish talk. There was a leather belting manufacturer who introduced me to literary criticism. They were amused by my naivety; but when they got down to their business affairs with Mr William and the watching of the market, I realized that although I knew a lot about leather, I knew nothing about trade and money, and that the ability or taste for making it was missing in me. Beale, the Shakespearean, showed that to me. He was a man of fifty who had inherited his business and was always in straits and was rather contemptuously treated in the trade because of his incompetence. He took me round his works and looked miserably at the rollers that came down from their arms, striking the skins, with a racket that he could not stand. “Keep out of it,” he said. “Unless you know how to make money, it is no good.”

  Hobbs sat or dangled from his high stool and said “Journalism’s the life, laddie. You read too many classics. You ought to read modern stuff. Journalists are the bright lads. What about W. J. Locke?”

  I saw it at once when I read The Beloved Vagabond, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne and Septimus, that Hobbs had modelled himself on Locke’s gentlemanly, Frenchified Bohemianism. A bottle of wine, a French mistress was his ideal—often realized; at any rate he had soon established one of the new women who came to the firm, the widow of a French soldier, in his flat. There was Thomas Hardy, too, he said, and Arnold Bennett. So I threw up the classics and took to the open (French) road with Locke as a successor to Stevenson; and a precursor to Belloc. I had discovered the writers I really admired: the travellers. I bought most of the books I read, and had done so at school too, by spending my food money on them. I gave up the Dining Rooms and the Express Dairy; instead in the lunch-hour I bought a bar of chocolate or a packet of biscuits and a book for a few pence at a shop near the arches at the station, walked across London Bridge and went on lunch-hour tours of the Wren churches—to the organ recitals at St Stephen’s in Walbrook and St Dunstan’s in the East and to St Magnus the Martyr in Billingsgate. I knew I should admire the Wren churches but they bored me. The classical Italian beauty of St Stephen’s in Walbrook seemed cold to the clerkly follower of Ruskin; cold and also—to a dissenter—moneyed and even immoral. The elegant St Mary Woolnoth and even St Magnus the Martyr and its carvings, seemed to me as “worldly” as the boardrooms of banks. And in Southwark Cathedral I had an experience of the “mechanical” worship of the Church of England. A young clergyman sitting at a harmonium in one of the aisles was teaching another the correct intonation of

  “The Lord be with you”

  and the response

  “And with Thy spirit”

  which they repeated dozens of times, trying to get it right. Now I could admire; then I scowled like a Bunyan at “vain repetitions.”

  The one real church, for me, was St Bartholomew’s. I visited these churches as a stern cultural duty, but also out of a growing piety towards the London past. The pleasure was in the organ recitals held in the lunch-hour. Lately introduced by our neighbour to Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, I now was entranced by Bach’s fugues. This taste was literary and due to Browning; all my tastes were conventionally Victorian. The monocled tycoon who had revolutionized the tanning of sheep-skins, heard with horror of my unfashionable ideas. I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob broke out in me in agony “Shall I never catch up?”

  I soon knew the alley ways of the city and intrigued to be sent to Ministries in Westminster. I ventured into Fleet Street and stared longingly at newspaper offices. Often I longed to be in love; but I was already in love with London, and although too shy to go into pubs—and hating anyway the taste of beer—I would listen to the rattle of dominoes among the coffee tables of the Mecca as far north as Moor-gate, and obscurely feel my passion. I even walked from Bermondsey to Westminster. To love, travel is almost the complete alternative; it is lonely, it is exhausting, but one has lived completely by one’s eyes and ears and is immolated in the world one is discovering. When, at last, I did find a girl, all we did was dumbly walk and walk round London Streets till I dropped her at her office door. When I read books of the glamour-of-London kind, I was disappointed with myself and tried to whip myself up into a glamorized state, for I could not see or know what the writer knew; but a London of my own was seeping into me without my knowing it and, of course, was despised because it was “every day experience.”

  One summer morning when I was on the heavy leather floor of our building, I heard the impudent whistle of Atterbury, the foreman of the floor. He was a cross-eyed, jeering little fly, known to everyone as Ankleberg.

  “I got a nice birthday present this morning,” he shouted. “My old woman give it me. Somethink I coulda done without. Same as last time, same as time afore that—nine bleeding times! Another bleeding kid. And no lie either.”

  He had an accusing manner.

  “Know what the woman next to her in hospital said to the doctor? ‘E’s never off me.’ ”

  Ankleberg stared and, then, he shouted with laughter and went off looking like the devil. He was the man who let me have a go at cutting maggots out of some cow-hides in return for loading a van with them.

  “Here Ankle,” sai
d his mate but coming over to me and opening a wallet. “This is what you want.” And showed him a packet of French letters.

  “Dirty bastard,” said Ankleberg. “You’ll get some poor girl into trouble.”

  Our talk was stopped by a curious sound of pumping and hammering going on in the sky and we went over to the gap. The sound was gunfire.

  “Stone me, it’s bleeding Fritz,” said Ankleberg.

  Up we went in the warehouse lift.

  “Nine little hungry mouths,” said Ankleberg on the way up. “What d’you make of that, son?”

  We got on to the roof. Not far off, high in the sky over the Tower of London and coming westward were a dozen German aircraft. They looked like summer gnats in the clear sky and around them hundreds of little cherub-like bursts of anti-aircraft fire were pocking the blue. Sudden bursts of bomb smoke came stepping along the Thames towards St Paul’s, where black and green clouds went up from the roofs: and then, down our way the aircraft came. In the street people were watching the planes, most of our staff were there and they ran indoors when a bomb fell; some said on a printing works in Newcomen Street near by, or in the Boro.’

  In a minute or two the raid was over. I was looking at the fires near St Paul’s. I tried to ring my father. There was no answer. I got permission to go and see if he was all right; but in fact I was longing to see the damage. It was, for those days, startling. A flight of aircraft had bombed London for the first time by day. Over London Bridge I went down the steps by St Magnus the Martyr into Billingsgate and saw the street walls of several houses and wharves had been stripped off, carts were overturned and horses lay dead among the crowds. The pubs in Bermondsey had filled with women pouring drink into themselves and their babies as I left; it was the same in Billingsgate. Outside a pub at the Monument, on the very spot where the old fire of London had started, one of those ragged and wild-looking women street singers with enormous plumes in her coster hat was skirling out a song, luscious with Cockney sentiment and melodrama: “Cit-ee of larfter, Cit-ee of tears.” I kicked my way through little streets of broken glass in Little Britain and, passing the stink of burning chemical works, reached my father’s office. The flames of the fire were so hot that he and I could not stay on his roof.

  (1968)

  FROM

  Midnight Oil

  CHAPTER ONE

  I started work on a misty morning. The shop was in an arcade and was the Paris branch of an English manufacturer of photographic plates and papers. At first I had thought the boss was French, for he had the black long curly moustache and frisked-up hair of a French barber of the period and wore a tight little jacket and boots with high heels. In fact, he was a London sparrow brought up in Marseilles. His sallow skin looked as though it had been painted with walnut stain and he spoke French fast but with an entirely English pronunciation. His “combiangs” and “ker voolay voos” raced through the tongue of Molière like a rusty lawn mower. He pointed out that on the small salary he was paying me I should have to leave my hotel and find a cheaper room.

  That morning, I saw that my job was a come-down after the leather trade. First of all, the situation of the shop was wrong. Du Maurier, Murger and W.J. Locke and Anatole France would have dropped me if they had known I was earning my living on the Right Bank within five minutes of Thomas Cook and the American Express: that I was in Paree and not Paris. My mind split: here I was copying, in pencil, lists of stock on half sheets of flimsy paper, hour after hour, in the dark back office of the shop, but my other self was across the river among the artists. The other people working in the shop were, first, the salesman: he was a heavy, black-haired, scowling young Highland Scot, a handsome man with grey threatening eyes and a very soft voice. He had run away from home at fifteen and, disguising his age, he had fought in the artillery in the 1914 war. He was a broken-nosed Army boxer, too. Towards the end of the war he had been blown off his horse and received a chunk of high explosive in his bottom and spoke of this with gravity. He had married a French woman and I imagined a pert little midinette: but one day she stood in the arcade outside making signs to him and I saw she was a plain, short woman, middle-aged and enormously fat. They lived in Montmartre and he spoke of her cooking reverently. He was a magnet to all the women who came to the shop. They became helpless or frantic at the sight of him; he would stand close to them and look down into their eyes, unsmiling, and speak in a low voice, with slow, pedantic deliberation.

  The rest of the staff were a nimble little guttersnipe from Montmartre called Pierre, and a gangling, hot-faced Breton. I was the clerk: they were messengers and packers. I checked the stock in a store-room opposite the shop and packed as well. After a month, when suddenly my awkward French became fluent, I had to serve the customers and deal with the dozens of Cash on Delivery forms at the Post Office. By this time, if the boss had left, I had to type out short letters to the customers, on an old English typewriter. I bought a book on French commercial correspondence. I was the hero of Pierre, the Montmartre boy, who jumped about as he watched me type with three fingers and helped me salt and pepper the letters with the proper French accents.

  The customers were mainly from firms of photographers in Paris, but many came up from the provinces bringing with them—to my mind—all that one thought of as the provincial bourgeois. Madame Bovarys came in to see the Scot. Their voices—and his—would drop to murmurs. Sometimes the two would disappear into the street together and the Scot would be away for half an hour; the office boys, particularly the Breton, danced about him when he came back trying to get details out of him. What was she like in bed? The male photographers had an artistic appearance which I admired. They wore hard-crowned black hats with wide brims and a loose black bow dangling from the collar. I longed to dress as they did, but the artistic dress was beyond my income.

  For some time I was the office joke. The French boys could not pronounce my name. I became Monsieur Shwep or Machin-Shwep, occasionally M. Victor and their clown. We all got on well. There is that picture of me standing by the counter of the shop, wearing the tweed jacket and flannel trousers—a uniform unknown to the French in the twenties for most Frenchmen wore black then—and my juvenile grin. I grinned most of the time for I was careless of the future, living from day to day, free to do as I pleased. I became finally acceptable to the French boys when in the evenings we left the shop and all walked arm in arm along the Boulevard practising the girl auction invented by the Breton.

  “How much to sleep with this one? A thousand, five hundred, a hundred, twenty, ten?” they shouted as the girls came towards us.

  One day I had a triumph.

  “M. Shwep—how much?”

  “Twenty-two francs fifty,” I said.

  They were ravished by this superb office joke. Twenty-two francs fifty was the well-known price of one of the photographic papers we sold. How easily the office humorist is born.

  But the Scot was the hero of the shop. It was he who was worshipped as we trailed after him to the bistro round the corner. His unsmiling face imposed. His drinking amazed. His betting at Auteuil and Longchamps was famous. We marched back to the shop after lunch, the Montmartre boy singing:

  O, O, O, O, O!

  Monsieur Mac boit pas d’eau.

  The boss was frightened of the Scot, who towered over him. Mac’s gestures were as slow as his speech. His arm came up as if judging for an uppercut when he talked to the boss, whose eyes began to flutter and his feet to edge back. Sometimes, when one of the Madame Bovarys came in to the shop and the magnetizing stares and monosyllabic invitations began, the boss would come out to stop them, but his courage always failed; and with ceremonious impudence Mac would say that in view of the importance of the lady as their best customer from Lille or Dijon, he thought he would go out for half an hour with her for a drink. One lunch time when we were at the bistro and he was talking to the barman about some horse-race or other, one of his women (who could not get a word in), became annoyed. She made a dart at his flies an
d pulled his cock out. The Scot turned slowly to her with admiration. He buttoned up and our procession marched back to the shop; Mac went straight to the boss and in the sad manner of some old Scots preacher he told the boss what had happened.

  “I thought it might be advisable to warn you about the bistro,” he said, “in case you should find yourself in a similar situation.”

  I left my room on the cinquième at the hotel. I now lived in a cheap room at Auteuil, a fashionable quarter, but my room was in the poorer part of it, where servants, shop assistants and small employees lived. I had given up trying the Latin Quarter, for thousands of Americans had swarmed in and put up the prices. I had been forced to reject a tiny room in the Mont St Geneviève because the place stank. In Auteuil I found a good cheap room on the ground floor in the flat of a war widow who went out to work every day as a charwoman. She was a sad women in her thirties who came from Tours, and she was very religious, a strong Catholic, and very proud of the pâtés of her region. A priest used to bring her little boy back from school at the weekends: nuns visited her. The flat had two rooms. Mine was nearly filled by a large bed and a washstand and looked out on a yard and dirty wall.

  When she was at home Mme Chapin wore a black overall from chin to feet and felt slippers. She had a lamenting voice and sounded like one of the Fates. On Sunday mornings, usually when I was naked and washing in cold water, for there was no bathroom, she would come in with my laundry and stand there telling me bits of her life.