A London Girl of the Eighties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  XIII. Under Roseberry Topping

  § 1

  THE following winter brought a holiday that was a contrast to the Welsh one. Mother and I were invited to go north again, to spend the Christmas with Tom. We were glad to get away for a week or two, not only to escape from the decorum of the boarding-house, but also from London itself. For a cloud had been hanging over the town—a mental one in addition to the customary fogs. After the lapse of over forty years Jack the Ripper has become as legendary as Dick Turpin, and to many he is almost a joke. No one can now believe how terrified and unbalanced we all were by his murders. A thriller in a book is quite different from a thriller round the corner. It seemed to be round the corner, although it all happened in the East End, and we were in the West; but even so, I was afraid to go out after dark, if only to post a letter. Just as dusk came on we used to hear down our quiet and ultra-respectable Edith Road the cries of newspaper-boys, in tones made as alarming as they could: ‘Another ’orrible murder!…Whitechapel!…Murder!…Disgustin’ details Murder!’ One can only dimly imagine what the terror must have been in those acres of narrow streets, where the inhabitants knew the murderer to be lurking. John Tenniel departed from his usual political subjects for Punch in order to stir public opinion by blood-curdling cartoons of ‘murder stalking the slums’, and by jeers at the inefficiency of the police. From all the suburban districts police were hurried to the East End, and yet we would read of a murder committed within a few moments of the passing by of a policeman. Naturally, I suppose, the murderer knew the time of the policeman’s beat, and waited till he had passed. Some sensible fellow thought of making the police more stealthy by putting india-rubber on their heels; and it was this that started the widespread use of rubber-heels by the public at large. Another strange by-product of the crimes was the disuse of black-bags for the ordinary professional or business man. A suspect had been described as ‘carrying a black bag’, and no one cared to be seen with one, not from fear of arrest, but simply from the ugly association—a curious instance of the whimsical way in which trade can suffer from a sudden drop in demand. The press was full of theories about the murderer. One idea was that he must be a sailor, because he could join his ship and get away quickly; another was that he must be a madman, because he hid so cunningly (though why this ability should be a sign of mental derangement I could never see); another strong suspicion was that he must be a doctor, because of the skill and rapidity with which the mutilations were performed, and also because of the uncanny disappearance of the man in a few seconds after the deed, for a doctor carrying a black bag of instruments was a familiar figure anywhere at all hours, and might easily masquerade as a passer-by and natural first-aider. Horrible though the murders themselves were, I think it was more the mysterious disappearances that affected people’s minds, giving a quality of the supernatural to the work—declared, of course, by some to be a judgement on vice. The murders stopped completely after one of surpassing savagery, looking as if an avenger had been seeking a special victim and had found her at last.

  § 2

  We found Tom in far pleasanter conditions than when we were in Darlington. He had moved out of Middlesbrough, a short train-run to the lovely little village of Ayton. Here he had bought a small house with a chicken-run and a quarter of an acre of garden. As he explained to me, any fraction of an acre always sounds ‘landed’. In addition to the baby we had first seen in our few visits from Darlington, he had now a second son, not quite a year old. They had moved into the new home in time for him to be ‘born at the foot of Roseberry Topping’—the hall-mark of a true Yorkshireman. Following the approved custom of babies he arrived at what an old servant of ours used to call an ‘ill-convenient’ time—when they were so lately settled into the house that they hardly knew where anything was, in the middle of the night, with neither doctor nor nurse at hand. Tom was quite unperturbed, and became, as he described it, the sole officiating priest.

  The elder boy was at the ravishing age of two and a bit, able to talk in his own fashion in a most companionable way. We had hardly arrived before he managed to ask me where I got my eggs. ‘From a shop in Kensington,’ I said. ‘Ours,’ he solemnly confided, ‘are laid.’ What he lusted after was to be among those present at every doing, preferably in kitchen or garden, and especially to hang about mother, whom he called ‘Gamble’, the nearest he could get to ‘Grannie’. She liked this name, and it stuck to her. He found ‘Molly’ easy to pronounce, and gave me no respectful prefix. I was his willing slave through most of his waking hours, which began far too soon for my liking. He slept in a cot in my room, and every morning about 6.30 he would wake, creep into my bed and demand a story. I would pretend to be sound asleep. He would then say ‘Molly way cup’ in ever louder tones, varied with ‘Once a pinny time’ (a kind of imitative magic). At last in despair he would wail forth ‘Molly goes to sleep all day long’. At this I could never help laughing, and then had to surrender and produce some kind of story till 8.

  Tom was amused at my devotion, and said I was practising for the future, adding cheerfully, ‘It’ll be a long time before you have a child as big as that, though’. He said I must be sure to have a little girl, for there were boys enough in the family already. I didn’t tell him that my great ambition was to have a son. Secretly I went farther and hoped for three sons and one daughter—which turned out to be exactly what came to me.

  It was a mild and open winter, so that we were able to do gardening, walking, and sketching nearly every day. One superb morning Tom asked me if I were game for a walk with him round the Topping. I was eager enough, for a walk alone with one of my brothers was always one of the special pleasures of life. The mere invitation was a pleasure, for it was certain they would not ask me if they didn’t want me. And with a brother there is always the understood and unexpressed background, the old family life and jokes and relations and friends that need but the slightest allusion to come in and enrich the conversation. In fact it was the conversation on that walk that sticks in my memory rather than the details of that Yorkshire landscape which acted as a kind of obbligato. On a walk, too, you can be far less reticent than in a room, for you do not eye one another, and the least object of the wayside can be used to interrupt any too-deep train of thought.

  Tom and I had a great deal in common now, and I got indirectly from him better hints on teaching that I had ever met with in a book. His ideal of discipline would certainly never enter any treatise on education, and yet I am sure it is sound: ‘Be a devil in class, and a good fellow outside it.’ ‘Is that really the whole of it?’ I asked. ‘Pretty well,’ he said. ‘You see, boys like to be ruled, and to be made to do the very stiffest work they can. These modern ideas of luring them to work are rotten. It’s quite interesting enough in itself, without all the fuss of “leading up” and “drawing forth”. Our Geography man told me that one day an inspector essayed to “take the boys for a bit”, and began genially with some “interesting” questions. The boys’ guesses flummoxed him, for he didn’t know enough geography to say whether they were right or wrong—and looked pretty ridiculous.’

  ‘Did he come into your class, Tom?’

  ‘No, I only saw him passing through the hall. A month or two later I met a man in a train and discovered in chatting to him that he was a school-inspector, so I naturally regaled him with our Geography incident, as an example of the merriment that some inspectors provide. But he saw nothing funny in it at all, and got out at the next station; and then I realized that it was the identical man!’

  ‘I suppose the moral of that is—don’t talk in railway carriages?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s always a good thing to have a chat with a stranger, for even the smallest boy or the biggest duffer will be sure to provide you with a new idea or something funny.’ ‘You are always on the look-out for the funny side of things, Tom. Are you by any chance ever low-spirited?’

  He laughed. ‘Odd that you should have asked me that now, for it was on this very r
oad that I really was miserable once, and not long ago. We had a Middlesbrough man to stay the week-end with us, to show him our new house. The Saturday was ghastly weather—murky, damp, depressing fog, and we could settle to nothing. So Nell, to get us out of the way, suggested that we should go for a “nice long walk”. So we set our teeth and started along this road, with a distant inn for lunch in our mind’s eye. The fog grew a little less, and we were warmed with our walk and pleasantly hungry when we reached the inn. We sat in the little parlour for some time before anyone appeared. At last the barman came in with a “Cold ham, Sir? Yes, Sir,” and a jerky attempt to arrange plates and glasses. We had barely put in a mouthful when he said to me in a confidential undertone, “You’ll excuse us being a bit upset-like, Sir, the landlord has just died upstairs.”’

  ‘And then you went home to have a good laugh, and find everything jolly by comparison?’

  ‘Yes, and so you can blow away most troubles.’ After we had paced along in silence for a bit my mind went back to school life and I asked Tom whether his boys were as a rule responsive.

  ‘Fairly well,’ said he, and then added: ‘When I look round at the boys in my class, some lazy, some blockheads, a few promising—just all sorts—I sometimes picture to myself the old scribe who was in charge of the synagogue school at Nazareth. I can see the dozen or so small boys squatted at his feet, spelling out their rolls, or more likely having to learn by heart the passages He declaimed to them—long bits of Isaiah and perhaps a psalm now and again as a treat. I expect there were blockheads and lazy boys there too, and one dreamy little chap who would ask tiresome questions that the old fellow couldn’t answer. “Wait till you are old enough to go up to Jerusalem, my boy, they will be able to tell you everything up there.”’

  ‘And he found when he did get there,’ said I, ‘that he didn’t get half so much as he got from the queer and disreputable people he met casually—“in the train” as you would say.’

  ‘That’s just what I say,’ said Tom, ‘we fools feed the mighty ones…there’s no waste.’

  §3

  That walk and talk were the more memorable because Tom was seldom to be caught in a serious mood; no doubt it was the rarity of our being alone together that induced it. General conversation is quite another matter; at that he was always felicitous. The family took special delight in his power of repartee, and we treasured many an instance of an enemy discomfited by it. But, family-like, we treasured still more the occasions when he failed. Once he was worsted by a very small newspaper-boy; it was the evening after a disappointing cricket match at Castleton, and a late edition of the local gazette was thrust towards him with ‘Paper, Sir? Cricket results, Sir.’ ‘No,’ said Tom a little testily as he turned away. ‘Ah!’ shouted the urchin after him, ‘I sees tha got a doock.’

  It was a sore point, for Tom was a leader in the cricket world, and on another occasion was quite ready with his reply to impudence. A bouncing captain of a visiting team was irritating every one by laying down the law, and exclaimed to Tom who disagreed on some point, ‘Why, any novice knows that!’ ‘But, thank heaven,’ replied Tom, ‘we are not all novices.’

  His wife was by no means slow-witted, but she had a capacity for inconsequence that amounted to a talent; and sometimes this oddity was awkward. At the end of a short excursion to see us in Kensington, Tom arranged to meet her for their journey north by the midnight train. ‘Mina, Nell, King’s Cross main departure platform, under the clock.’ This clock was Tom’s favourite trysting-place, and she knew it well. He arrived in good time, but there was no sign of her. Expecting to see her rushing up he stood waiting till the train started, and then wandered about in search of her, to find her pacing up and down among the cabs outside. She explained by saying that she thought she would make sure of his coming in time by going to meet him. The result was that they had to sacrifice their cheap tickets and pay full fare for the next train. We used to wonder how Tom could be so patient with her. But he was not patient. By some blessed alchemy he turned even her blunders into amusement, and sucked quite the money’s worth of the ticket out of the situation. He used to say that the world would be a much duller place without Nell. She was a jolly, companionable soul, never heavy-going, and as her boys grew older they encouraged and treasured her absurdities. The younger one had been out for a long walk by himself one day and made her anxious. ‘Where have you been all this time, you naughty boy?’ was her greeting. ‘Only for a walk, mother.’ ‘Then it’s the last walk you take in this world, my boy.’ Her anxiety was genuine, although it took such a curious mode of expression. Once she said to me, ‘I can’t think what I should do, Molly, if Tom were to die, or do something ugly of that kind.’ Occasionally she took a leaf out of Tom’s book and made a little drama out of a contretemps. One day during our holiday Tom had to go into Middlesbrough, and was not to return till supper-time. So Nelly and Gamble and I arranged to put off our midday dinner, and turn it into a hot supper for him to share on his return. We plotted roast veal and the usual accompaniments. Unfortunately the butcher didn’t come, and when we went round to his little shop in the village we found it closed, and indeed all the other shops, because there was a funeral. Nelly fretted a great deal at the lack of a joint, so that Gamble and I were relieved when a telegram came to say that Tom was staying to supper with a friend and would be late. We had eggs and went to bed. All was serene. But the next morning Nell could not cease talking of her annoyance at Tom’s absence from supper, of the trouble we had all been at, in order to make it a really grand supper, of our disappointment that he should miss it, and so on. Gamble and I were laughing, but she grew more and more eloquent till at last Tom said:

  ‘Well, let’s hear what this wonderful supper actually was.’ ‘As it actually turned out, dear, there wasn’t any supper at all, because the butcher was shut, and being buried.’

  Tom was quite capable of trying return tricks on her, and one morning he alarmed us all by coming into the kitchen where we were busy over dinner preparations, to announce, ‘I’ve got the plague!’ Holding himself as though in agony, he added, ‘I’ve got a pain in the groin, and that’s one of the early symptoms.’ The word ‘groin’ made us laugh, and the joke was over when he explained that he had been reading the Journal of the Plague. But he told me later on that it was not entirely a joke, for Defoe’s writing was so vivid that it really did start an imaginary pain. He thought that most illnesses were spread by the pleasure people take in describing their symptoms.

  ‘You have never been ill in your life, have you?’

  ‘Never. Not even toothache. Nor Nell. We choke one another off if we see any likelihood of giving way. I’ll show you this evening.’

  At supper, accordingly, Tom breezed in with ‘Feeling a bit tired, Nell?’

  ‘Yes, dear, I’ve got a little headache, but it’s nothing to speak of.’

  ‘Then,’ said Tom, ‘why speak of it?’

  Nell laughed happily, and I thanked heaven I was not in a home where a kind and thoughtful husband would have prescribed lying down, fetched eau-de-Cologne and petted his wife into a real headache.

  Supper was usually the jolliest meal of the day. The little boys were safe in bed, and could get into no more danger or mischief, so Nell was at peace. Gamble and I were flushed with our triumphs in getting them there. While I dealt faithfully with Viv, Gamble was allowed to bath baby Llew. Gamble was sketchy in everything she did, and I believe Nell was in tortures of anxiety as she watched the casual way in which her baby was handled. Once (when Nell was out of the room) Llew was dropped on the floor. I was aghast, but Gamble said it would do him good rather than harm; and indeed he seemed none the worse and was picked up smiling.

  After supper I seized on Tom every evening to give me some help with my Greek. I have never come across such a teacher as he was. He enjoyed smoothing down all the troublesome little passages, and showing them to be examples of some general principle that would be useful for future difficulties. He agre
ed with me that most annotated texts evaded real troubles, or explained them in some fantastic way. He assured me that he had come across this explanation of a subjunctive: ‘The fact was so certain that the Indicative was too feeble for it, so the Subjunctive was used as a gesture.’

  Fortunately for me one of my set-books was the part of the Odyssey that describes the return of Ulysses, and Tom made me enjoy its humour and pathos. The droves of cattle and pigs going to stock poor Penelope’s larder, to pacify her detested suitors…the contented death of old Argos, after pricking up his ears in recognition of his master…the excitement of the shooting with the great bow. I got so worked up about it that I burst out:

  ‘There’s nothing in Latin that can come near this.’

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Tom. ‘Greek is far finer, I admit, but Latin can do something that Greek can’t.’ Then he showed me how concise and terse Latin can be, delighting me with Tacitus’ summing up of Galba in one sentence without even a main verb. ‘And look here,’ said he, ‘see whether you can express in only three Latin words these fifteen words of English: “as soon as the soldiers appeared upon the scene the insurrection was at an end”. Lots of my boys have enjoyed having a try at that.’ After a few moments’ contemplation of it I declared it to be impossible. ‘Here you are then,’ said Tom, ‘viso milite quies.’

  While we were carrying on with this kind of stuff Gamble and Nelly were reading or sewing. Nelly’s complete ignorance of anything remotely learned was a source of open amusement to us and even herself. But one evening while we were deep in some Greek, Tom looked up and muttered, ‘By the way, who was the father of Calypso?’