Young Phillip Maddison

by Henry Williamson

  Having crossed over Ludgate Circus, Phillip with Gran’pa and Mother went along Farringdon Street, to the steps up to High Holborn, and so to Sparhawk Street. Phillip thought of the old days of real trees and green fields, of sparrowhawks keeping down the pigeons. He would like to get a couple of young ones next year, tame them, and let them go early one morning in front of St. Paul’s. With lots of hawks about, London might be a little more interesting, if he had to come and work in it. The sight of a hawk flying over would be a link with the past.

  The offices of Mallard, Carter & Turney, Ltd., were in a tall brick building several stories high. The impression was of dinginess and many dirty glass windows, and flocks of sparrows in the road outside, on which drays and vans moved behind drivers with peaked caps, and small boys standing on the tail-boards, holding to ropes from the hooded roofs.

  They entered by an iron-studded door, and there in front was a glass-partitioned office lit by two gas lights, not even mantles, but old jets, like Father had in the bathroom under the ring, to keep the little can of washing water warm for the morning. The ring at home was nearly worn out, by the fumes of all the years. Ever since he could remember, it had been there.

  Phillip was introduced to a perky old gentleman with a bald head and fluffy bits of white hair as though stuck on its sides. This was the Secretary. Then to “Young Mr. Mallard, who is our Accountant,” who had a cold clammy hand. Then to a fat man called Hemming, the General Manager, who smiled fatly and hurt his hand when shaking it.

  “Pleased to meet you again. You don’t remember me, do you? Now tell the truth and shame the devil. Do you remember me, eh?”

  Phillip looked up at the fat smiling face, and thought that he did not like him. He did remember him chiefly because he had hurt his hand last time when he had shaken it. He did not know what to say, so he said nothing.

  “Come come,” said Mr. Hemming. “This will never do. If you come to join us one day, you must find your voice, you know. Customers don’t like travellers who wait for them to speak first, otherwise they say to them ‘Nothing this time’. Eh, Mr. Turney? Pleased to see you looking so well, sir.”

  While he had been speaking, Mr. Hemming was doing up some buttons on his waistcoat.

  Gran’pa wanted to talk with Mr. Hemming, so Phillip and Mother went into the printing works, accompanied by “young Mr. Mallard”. There were men in leather aprons and rolled shirt-sleeves, setting lead type with tweezers, picking out letters almost as fast as a woodpecker licked up ants on the ground with its long tongue. Further on, printing machines were moving backwards and forwards, while other men laid on sheets of paper, which they whisked away when the lever was raised and the inky roller passed over the type again. These were posters for a Sale by Auction, the foreman said, wiping his hands on his apron.

  Upstairs they saw Hubert, and “young Mr. Mallard”, who looked quite old and constantly stroked his chin, and hardly spoke at all, left them to return downstairs.

  Soon afterwards Mother said she had to keep an appointment with the dentist, and would be back in an hour’s time.

  “Now be a good boy while I’m gone, and don’t get into mischief,” she whispered. “Look after him, Hubert.”

  “Oh rather, Aunt Hetty,” said Hubert, laying his arm affectionately on Phillip’s shoulder.

  Hubert took him into the Lithography and Marbling Room. The lithographic stones were yellow, and men were painting patterns and pictures on them, like making transfers, to be pressed on paper afterwards. But it was the Marbling which interested Phillip. There were many shallow troughs standing on three legs on the floor. The men liked the tripods, said Hubert, as they were steadier than four legs on the old uneven chestnut-slab floor. The liquid lying in the troughs was size, made of gum tragacanth dissolved in soft water; and upon this layer the paint, in various colours, was flipped and shaken, or straked and laid, according to the pattern that was wanted—they used five main patterns for the end-papers of the Firm’s ledgers and account books, said Hubert. Some customers preferred Comb, other Snail, Peacock, Hair-veining, or Turkish.

  One of the men showed how Comb was made. First he skimmed the size, to remove the film caused by evaporation. Then he took some brown paint on a small, soft-haired brush, and strewed it in a broad line upon the size. Next, some yellow paint with another brush, then blue, and finally vermilion. With the “master comb” he drew wavy lines through the paints, which stayed wavy when the comb had been lifted out.

  “The colours don’t run into one another, like they might if there wasn’t no ox-gall mixed in wi’ the paints,” he explained. “The gall also helps the colours to marble, you see.”

  “What does marble mean?” asked Phillip.

  “The paint spreads like, you see, an’ ’olds the marble to isself like.”

  “It gives the paint a sort of coat, doesn’t it, like gelatine?” Hubert enquired of the man, very politely, Phillip thought, although he was Gran’pa’s grandson.

  “That’s it, sir, you’ve got it, you got my meaning all right.”

  “What’s Snail like, Hubert?”

  “Well, like snail shells, Phillip. You get that effect by tapping the side of the trough, don’t you, and shaking drops on the size?” he asked the man, as though he did not know already.

  “That’s right, sir,” smiled the man. “Then I makes the whirls with a goose-quill, see, like this.”

  He made some drops of all shapes and colours lie on the size, like moon and planets floating in space, then with the quill made them whirl about one another, but never in one another.

  “The quill’s the master, the colours follow it,” said Hubert.

  “And the ox-gall keeps them apart, like a sort of force of gravity,” said Phillip. Hubert smiled at him.

  “Jolly good simile, old man.”

  “But how do you get the colours off the size?” Phillip asked the man, imitating the manner of Hubert.

  “I’ll soon show you, sir.”

  The man got a length of paper, and held it before him.

  “This sheet is wetted a day afore it’s used, you see, and put wi’ others in the screw press. Then, ten minutes afore it’s used, my mate washes them sheets in alum water, to earth the pattern. I’ll show you.”

  He laid the sheet in the Snail trough, pressed it down, gently and evenly.

  “Now watch the tray carefully,” he said. “An’ you might see somefink strange.”

  Lifting up the sheet, the man said “Hey Presto!” and peering intently, Phillip saw only the liquid size, like barley water, lying in the trough. There was not even a speck of colour left.

  “Where’s it all gone?” he asked, pretending to be mystified. Of course, it was on the paper the man was holding in his hand.

  “I forgot to put in the magic drops,” said the man. “Look!” He turned over the paper. It was a blank. Phillip was now genuinely puzzled. It was a trick, of course, but how had he done it? Ah, he and Hubert had changed papers while he had been looking at the trough!

  The pattern looked very shiny and bright on the paper. The man explained that now it would be dried, when it would be ready for glazing. That was done by the master marbler, on the table in the centre of the floor. He had been doing nothing else for over fifty years, Hubert explained, as they moved away, after thanking the man, who said, “It’s quite all right,” in a pleased voice.

  The dry marbled sheets were smeared with a film of bees-wax, heated on a gas ring in a gummy iron pot, then polished with the swinging calendar. This calendar was a heavy block of white marble, with a polished under-surface, bolted to the end of an iron arm hanging from the beam in the ceiling. It swung down loosely, enabling the old man to use it like an iron, judging the weight to within a hundredth of an inch, said Hubert. The final gloss to the papers was given by an agate stone, which was kept in a wash-leather bag, to prevent dust and grit getting on it.

  Upstairs were the binders, some of them girls, working at benches. Some were stitching the
sheets with treadle machines, using fine white cord which Phillip thought would do for fishing, if it were dyed first. A man was cutting edges with a thing like a little guillotine. The girls kept glancing at him, some smiling, but Phillip pretended not to see them. They were probably bad, like those in the Randiswell Rec at night. Why else should they smile that sort of cunning smile?

  Poor people were associated in Phillip’s mind with bad people: white faces, many of them covered with pimples, some with scowling expressions, or blank looks, dull looks; all in shabby clothes. Poor people were quite different from ordinary people. Even Cranmer was really different, although he tried hard not to appear different. He thought that quite ordinary things were unusual, such as forks.

  When Hubert spoke to one of the girls working at the bench, she giggled and looked round at the others, before giving Hubert a sort of scared look, and calling him “sir”. Phillip had read in many magazine stories how women were inscrutable, mysterious, unpredictable (the dictionary gave this word a disappointing meaning when he looked it up, hoping to find in it a clue to Helena Rolls’ nature). He kept well away from the benches, pretending to be preoccupied with some thought. But on leaving, he glanced back, and three girls waved at him as he went through the door. Greatly daring, Phillip waved back, then quickly retreated, his footfalls clanking down the fretwork iron stairs.

  “Well,” said Thomas Turney, “What d’you think of it all, eh?”

  “Oh, it’s all right, Gran’pa,” replied Phillip; and wondered why Mr. Hemming laughed.

  After tea in an A.B.C. shop Thomas Turney said to Phillip, “Your Mother tells me you met Sir Wilfred Castleton, proprietor of ‘The Daily Trident’. Well, m’boy, his offices are only just across the street. We pass that way to the Embankment. You’ve got a bent for writing, how about calling on him, what d’you think? I’ve met ’im, he’s a pleasant sort of man, he’s Irish, like me mother. You’ll be leavin’ school in a year or so. It might lead to something, you never know. No time like the present—what d’you say?”

  “No thanks, Gran’pa,” replied Phillip immediately, in panic at the thought of having to leave the life he knew.

  Chapter 28

  JAUNT TO BELGIUM

  “WELL done, m’boy!” exclaimed Gran’pa, when Phillip went in to tell him, casually, that he had passed the Oxford Local. He had got his remove, too, into the Upper Fifth. He had failed in History, Geography, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Latin; but was satisfactory in Algebra, Arithmetic, Divinity, Physics, and Chemistry.

  “No Spanish? A pity, Spanish is the coming language, for trade in South America. Our future lies in the export trade, with our merchant navy. This intensifying competition with Germany will have to be diverted to the South Atlantic, where there are great potential markets for our manufactures. He-he-he.” This last comment in pseudo laughter was caused by Phillip wandering out of the room.

  “Phillip never listens to me,” remarked Thomas Turney, turning to his housekeeper, Miss Rooney, who sat demurely, hands on lap, in one of the two upholstered chairs on either side of the fire-place. He himself sat in his usual wheel-backed yew chair, with the cane fire-and-draught guard on its back. His cat crouched, with shut eyes, on his cocked-up knee, cased in perennial blue serge. Thomas Turney now possessed more than two dozen such pairs of trousers, with their jackets and waistcoats, all bought at January sales during the last few years: thus he allayed one of his anxieties about the future.

  Phillip went down to Uncle Hugh’s room, to talk to Bob, Uncle’s man. Uncle nowadays could walk only by clinging with one hand to the broad leather strap Bob wore round his jacket. Bob came from Mercy Terrace, down by the station, from a family of soldiers. There were four brothers, all of them with dark hair and dark, almost black eyes. It was a little scaring to go into Bob’s house to see him, for when the brothers were at home they sat there so quiet, yet seeming ready at any time to break into frightful rages. They had joined the Army because they had not been able to get any work, Bob told Phillip. Two had worked in the docks, until the strike six months before, when they had taken the King’s shilling.

  The thing that disturbed Phillip, secretly, was the attitude of Bob and his brothers towards the girls they met in the streets at night. They hunted them down, almost as though they were enemies. Bob told Phillip, with a sort of subdued angry satisfaction, what he and his pal did when they got off with a couple. He took a card out of his breast pocket, with a drawing, on one side, of a thing like a leg-of-mutton bone. On the other side was a heart.

  “You show this to a girl, this side first, and say, ‘This is the bone that breaks your heart,’ then you turn the card over and say, ‘And this is the heart what was broken.’ Blime, me and Alf had some sport the other foggy night, outside the Mission! Two girls arst us what the card meant. They was pretendin’, but us warn’t! So we took ’em inside the Mission, and showed ’em. They didn’t want to, then, but it was too late.”

  Bob was a sort of Jack Hart, Phillip thought. He grinned in the same rather frightening way. The station end of Randiswell beyond the Railway pub and the Mission, was rather a sinister place. That was where the Monks had lived. Phillip remembered how the father of Mona Monk, the servant Mother had had when he was little, had come up drunk one night and smashed in the front door. Father had knocked him out with his special constable’s truncheon and blown his whistle for the police to come and take Monk away on a stretcher. Mona, although only fourteen, had had a baby afterwards. Gerry had told him that her own father had given it to her. How awful some people were!

  Phillip’s business with Bob in Uncle Hugh’s room was over a silver cigarette box he had bought at a pawnshop. He wanted Bob to sell it back to the pawnbroker, and buy with the money a small plated derringer pistol lying in the window. With this he intended to shoot wild pigeons in the woods of Whitefoot Lane. Bob promised to sell the silver box, which was fairly heavy for its size, with flowers and ferns engraved on the lid, and buy the derringer, which was marked 1/6. Phillip had bought the box for that price, a month or so previously.

  Bob was washing out Uncle Hugh’s rubber thing, which was fixed to Uncle at night, to prevent him having accidents in bed. It was not very nice to look at, but Uncle had now lost control of his functions. Phillip was mildly sorry for Uncle Hugh, who soon would have to go away to a nursing home. He was failing fast, said Mother. Uncle Hugh was an awful warning, Mother often told him, never to do anything that he knew was wrong. “Ah, my son, I often say to myself that the saddest words in the language are, ‘Too Late’.”

  Phillip “simply itched” to be the owner of the derringer. He had at least another year at school, now that he had passed the Oxford Local. Father had seen the Magister, and it had been agreed that he should stay an extra year at school after the five years of the scholarship period ran out in April, Father paying the fees. Father said that there were good prospects in the future for Actuaries in the Life Assurance companies, but he would have to buck up and improve the mathematical side of his studies, and get First Class Honours next time with distinctions, if he were to have any chance at all. Phillip had received this information with voiceless gloom. What he would like to be was an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, the sort who wrote the pamphlets about what birds were good for the farmer, and why.

  This would entail a certain amount of examination upon the contents of various birds’ crops, to see what they fed on. To get the specimens, they would have to be shot first. Phillip’s idea of this work involved a motorcycle, the derringer pistol, and travelling about all over England. He could take a small tent, and camp out, cooking by a fire in the woods. He could take photographs of birds or their nests. Fishing, too, might be done, in order to find out what fish fed on. Then he never need go to work in London, inside the sort of office Father worked in, or the awful counting house of Mallard, Carter & Turney, Ltd.

  Anyway, another year at school would put off the fateful time when he must grow up and become a s
lave like Father.

  “Then, you’ll do that for me, Bob?” Bob nodded.

  *

  “Phillip, m’boy,” called out Gran’pa, as he came up from Uncle Hugh’s room, gloating at the thought of the derringer, which took the same ammunition that Father fired in his .22 miniature rifle.

  For a period, Phillip had dreamed of having the old rifle Mother had bought for Father, for a New Year’s present, converted to take .22 ammunition, as Father did not want it. It was an old Martini-Henry rifle, practically a dummy, and used for drill only. Mother had bought it from Peter Wallace’s father. Father had made a fuss, as usual, about the Martini-Henry, saying it was a white elephant, and why had she wasted her money, instead of consulting him first? Mother had in the end gone away to be by herself in the front room. When he had followed her there, she said, wiping her eyes. “I can never do anything to please your Father, Phillip. When the time comes for you to get married, I hope, if only for the sake of your little children, you will think always before you speak! I did not waste my money in buying it, anyway it was my own money, left me by Mamma, and——”

  Here she had cried again; but was smiling soon, and telling Father that she was sorry she had made a mistake, and would he please buy the right kind at the Stores, and allow her to pay for it? Father had bought himself a .22 miniature rifle, but had insisted on paying for it himself. He had, however, consented to allow Mother to give him, for a present, the brown canvas bag in which it was carried.

  “Mother has got only a very little money of her own, Phillip. I do not think that she should spend any of it on me. Anyway, your Mother knows that I do not want people to give me presents. I do not deserve them. I am well aware that I am a failure.”