IV. BOOKS AND SCHOOL FRIENDS
For the most part I remember rather the joy of having and reading books than particular passages. I remember the eager walks over Wandsworth Common to borrow volume after volume of the Waverley novels, but of Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, Peveril of the Peak and The Talisman, not a rack is left. Of The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder rather more is left. They gave me an idea of a noble savage. The Pathfinder himself towers in memory as grandly as Milton’s Satan but more dimly. The name of the girl Cora has folded itself up in my mind like a gentle snake.... I read some of Scott’s poems in the same year. They made deeper impressions than the novels. I was continually repeating with a throb:
With Chester charge and Lancashire, or
Charge, Chester, charge!
On Stanley on
Were the last words of Marmion.
The duel between FitzJames and Roderick Dhu was the greatest thing of all. The next best was Roderick Dhu’s whistle that caused armed warriors suddenly to rise up out of the mountain bracken. I could scarcely bear the excitement of describing these scenes to another boy as we walked along Bolingbroke Grove. My voice was thick and broken with the effort of ‘And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu’. The excitement caused a not entirely unpleasant aching tenderness in a certain part, just as open praise did and still does. Of course when I found a family of Rodericks in Swindon I linked them to the poem.
The only poems which I remember having read aloud to me at an early age were Longfellow’s. My father used to read or recite The Children’s Hour very often. The pathos, or his sense of it, touched me, and I received faint but delicious images of ‘grave Alice’ and ‘laughing Allegra’ and ‘Edith with golden hair’. I could also enjoy impressions in the minor key. The only one of the many songs we sang at school which I can recall was in the minor key. It was a kind of dirge for a North American Indian. I can still hum the melody, but I remember no more of the words than ‘Far far away in the depths of the wild wood’. These were several times repeated. The rhyme to ‘wild wood’ was I believe ‘childhood’. I used to sing this to myself, and have periodically returned to it ever since. I liked also ‘Lucy Gray’, the one poem which I remember to have learnt at the Board-school: but I never could understand ‘and snapped a faggot band’. I do not think I had any tangible sadness to which the song gave utterance. There was for me at that time no sadness, e g., in the destruction of the orchard of the great house near by, and the portioning of its park-like meadow into streets. Anybody could enter now. We pillaged artichokes. Some boys took sackfuls of the soil and I helped one to drag his down the street; out of the wounds thus worn in it, it was bleeding dark mould on the pavement.
My books did not hamper my games, nor in any way alter them except that I could not wear sword and shield hereafter without FitzJames haunting and inspiring me. I played as much as ever and walked to Wimbledon more and more. I could also enjoy kinds of fighting where it was impossible to think of poetry. For example, I had a long tussle with a rough after a quarrel during fishing, and was only beaten by the intervention of a third party armed with an old kettle. It was fun, too, to battle at a distance with stones, dodging and casting at the same instant. In one of these combats I got a deep scalp wound made ever more memorable by my aunt fainting at the blood.
While we were at this house my mother presented me with four brothers at intervals of two years, but, as I have no recollection of them during that period beyond the fact that on certain dim occasions in our street or at Swindon one or other was present, I say nothing about them. Being thus seven in family we moved to a large house in one of the roads parallel to the old one. The great long low windowless van that we stamped about in — the bread and cheese eaten anyhow in the confusion — the odd jobs of fetching and carrying — these were pleasures. I am not at all sure now whether I made one of the journeys on the tail of the cart. And yet I am perfectly sure that the name of the elder boy who shared these pleasures was — and that my mother said he was a good boy and had been very useful.
On the first few days after the move I went several times most of the way down from school to the old house before realizing my mistake. Whether I had regrets for it or not, it began almost at once to have a dreamy charm too faint to be describable. It was a visible piece of the past, a skeleton, a hollow shell that did without us. Of course the new house had also a charm. Its size allowed an empty room for us to play in, and a box-room. Perhaps it was not until a little later that the box-room became attractive, because it was dark and because in it was a wooden box containing inexhaustible treasures. These were chiefly old books, old magazines, old photographs of unknown people. Many and many a time I took them all out, sometimes in search of something I had noticed among them before and then not troubled about, sometimes in more uncertainty but equal eagerness, at other times with no object save testing the inexhaustible surprises of the box. At intervals of a year or less I must have taken everything out and put it back again, with moments of hastiness when things were moved in armfuls, fully a dozen times. I think I could do it at least once yet. My slender undefined expectations connect the search with that lost book of my earlier childhood about the key of knowledge. But I forbear to amplify this. One of the discoveries I made was of Pickwick Papers. Sitting in the dust with dusty eyes I read about sticklebacks in the Hampstead Ponds. I could not get on much farther. Too many of the people had ridiculous names. The books had nothing in common with the Waverley novels or the Compleat Angler or Sir Samuel Baker’s travels. At about this time I began to keep my own books on a shelf of their own and to paste numbers inside them as I had seen done with library books: to raise the numbers to a respectable size I took my two next brothers into partnership and we lent them out to one another with formality. The sum of our united ingenuities would at no time have been very great.
However, I had my own way. It was usually easy for me to get it. While I was still at the Board-school I was conscious of possessing some power over my physical superiors, though the use of it was unconscious. I cannot say how much it was exerted, if it was at all, by means of wheedling, begging, cringing, or perhaps putting others into the position of feeling brutal or awkward if they refused me.
My later days at the Board-school were pleasant enough. My class sat in the same room and was taken by the same master as a special small class of the oldest boys in the school. They used to read accounts of the Massacre of Glencoe and produce essays on what they remembered. I made friends with one or two of them, laughed at their jokes and catch-phrases, and was expected to enjoy the picture of the gravid uterus of a rabbit in a book which one of them showed me.
Towards the end of these days I spent the greater part of a summer term in a Board-school in Swindon where the head master was a friend of my father’s. I became a Wiltshire boy in accent. I made friends and sweethearts too, and at the Fête in August spent all the day and evening with a girl on each side of me — I do not think I had ever before or since so much pride and confidence. To one of the girls, a dark sturdy beauty named Laura, I was more or less faithful for several years. Though she knew and did nothing that I valued, to have a girl by me on a walk pleased me intensely. I suppose the love of having my own way guided me surely for the most part towards girls who were not flirts. I liked also elder girls. Some of the most blissful hours I ever spent were in country walks with a buxom Welsh cousin named Florence, who was probably eight or nine years my senior. She was staying at my grandmother’s one summer when I was, and she and I used to walk along the quiet road, or over meadows, to Shaw or Lydiard. I thought her beautiful, her rosy face, her voice, herself beautiful. To me she was all sweetness and kindness. We used to go into a farmhouse door or into the milking shed and get milk and perhaps eat a lardy cake. I remember her taking out her purse. Everything about her was somehow sweet and perfect. I suppose I had a sort of happy unfettered adoration for her without knowing it. I never saw her after that summer.
I exchanged the Boa
rd-school when I was ten for a private school. Here there were fifty or sixty boys of from ten to seventeen years of age, perhaps half of them boarders. They were the sons of tradesmen, professional men, moderately well-to-do clerks, and men of small independent means. Only one of them had I known before. He preceded me by a term from the Board-school and at once asserted his superiority by making a fool of me. In the small gravel playground there was a swing consisting of a long board suspended at either end by a pair of chains. A boy at each end could work it up to what seemed to me a terrible height, the prime fear being to jump off backwards from your position just as the board began to swing forward. I took my first ride with this old school-fellow. The bell for lessons rang while we were well up, and he dropped off, leaving me helplessly to wait and watch the school assemble, and pointing me out with malice as well as grins when I at last took my place. The schoolroom was a large single hall adjacent to the large old brick house where the boarders lived with the head master. The three classes under the head and two assistants all occupied the same room, but faced different ways. In the fourth quarter of the room stood the boarders’ more substantial desks, where they kept silkworms and white mice. The boarders predominated in other ways. The familiar life together had given them a style and subject matter of their own. Knowing the masters privately they treated them with open ease and half-concealed amusement. They were pretty faithfully imitated by the day boys. But the head master was of stone. He wore a black gown. So long as he was in the room no sound was to be heard beyond a dismal foot shuffling, a pen dropping, a boy asking a question, a master answering or explaining, the head dictating or clearing his throat. While he was out the hubbub was so general that the assistants could hardly single out a particular one to punish, for if it had a ring-leader it was some spirited bright popular boy whom it would be unpleasant and ruinous to punish.
I continued to accumulate information in history and geography, to do harder and harder sums, to copy models of handwriting. I learnt a few Latin declensions and conjugations. With the rest of the school I sat listening to Mr. — talking physiology as if the body were a newly discovered machine and we were angels. Just before the holidays like everyone else I wrote a letter to my dear parents telling them what had been done during the term, when the holidays began and how long they were to last. But I learnt also how to keep silkworms alive, and added to the boarder’s pocket-money by buying as many as I could. I had a penny or twopence a week.
One of the masters, a black-haired snub-nosed kindly energetic freshman, was fond of me. He chaffed me about the freckles I got in the summer holidays; he gave me the Lamplighter and numbers of Horner’s Penny Stories; he came round to see my father and offered to take me to the baths and teach me to swim. I had no particular liking for him or gratitude for his liking for me, and when I left the school I left all but the first of his letters to me unanswered and so tired his attention.
I only knew one boarder at all well. He was a Welsh boy from Flint several years older than myself, and wanting to do something to please him, I gave him the leather-bound New Testament which I had received as a prize at the Board-school. I cannot recall that boarders and day boys had any united or organized games except paper-chases.
A paper-chase made one of the Saturdays at this school a great and notable day for me. For I then discovered a piece of country as it seemed to me, exactly like the real country at Swindon and quite unlike the commonland at Wimbledon. Here were private but not inaccessible copses, hedges with oaks in them, and wandering paths, rough lanes, scant cottages. I got left behind and lost the rest of the school except one older boy. We had bread and cheese at the ‘George Inn’. That day I ran, walked and crawled six or seven miles out and the same distance back. For a year it may be I left this piece of country unrevisited.
I made several friends among the day boys. One who had a deep voice and must have been much older used to take me out to share his adventures on a double ‘sociable’ tricycle; and he gave me white rats. But I had most to do with a boy only a year or two older than myself, named Jonathan, who introduced me to some of his father’s workshops, and particularly the carpenter’s shop. Adjoining this shop were roomy houses for pigeons of several kinds, Belgian hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and white rats. Fine afternoons, therefore, had now scarce any advantages over wet ones. Making additions to the cages, cleaning them out, feeding the birds and animals, handling them, selling or exchanging them, talking about them, set the hours rolling lazily, swiftly. In a day or two I had learnt all, alas! that I ever did about the use of saw, hammer, screwdriver, and brace. That is to say I was now a quick unscrupulous maker of cages of all sizes. I fitted doors to them, fronts of split wood and wire-netting, roofs of tarred felt laid upon laths. I spent all the shorter sections of my spare time in making, altering, and mending cages for pigeons, rabbits and white mice.
I retained few of my old school friends. One of them, though he too had moved and in the opposite direction, made several attempts to keep up our friendship. He was a very swift runner and always walked in the middle of the road wearing sandshoes. The short period of separation made me shy when he came to the door on a Saturday afternoon, so that I was almost inclined to deny that I knew him. He must have felt this and at length altogether ceased to come. Before long I was sorry for this.
I must have begun keeping pets soon after entering the new school. Through them, or rather through the pigeons, I got to know other fanciers, men and boys, in the neighbourhood. For example, a pigeon house hung on the wall of a house in the street at right angles to ours and visible a hundred yards away from the back garden where I kept my pets. I used to see the owner, a much older boy called Henry, leaning out of the window to attend to his pigeons or to set them at liberty for a flight. They ascended half a mile high and remained circling for a great time, or if they did not and tried to perch they were driven up again with loud clappings. The boy’s whistle to his pigeons, a peculiar shrill anxious one, and a mild luring one, I acquired as soon as possible. Still I felt that the boy looked down on me. My birds never flew much higher than the topmost chimneypots, and they used to get lost or caught by cats. One day I was sure that a pigeon of mine had entered his cage and I went round to ask for it. Thus we became acquainted. He began by denying the fact with a mixture of indignation and chaff, and I think he made a small charge before restoring the bird. But I supposing this was the custom or admiring his superior age, skill, and aplomb, was far from complaining. I accepted his patronage gladly. He used to come round for me in the evening with a whistle instead of a knock — not like either of the pigeon calls, but very expressive. He would begin with pairs of notes imperious in tone, and repeated if necessary several times more and more loudly. Then he waited, sauntering backwards and forwards outside. If I did not come out he changed to a more questioning call which had in it a despairing quality or one meant to raise despair in me. It gave me a last chance. Often he had a bird to show me for admiration or for sale. I found it hard ever to refuse anything he praised to me. In my case to acquire a new pigeon was a delight. So in I used to go, if success was at all possible, to tell my father and mother about this supreme opportunity, in short to ask for a shilling or one-and-six. Not too seldom, I succeeded. At times I possessed a dozen of different breeds — athletic homers, heavy wattled antique-looking dragons, dainty almond tumblers, feminine owls. For a few days I rejoiced in a pair of red-ruffed Jacobins sent me from Wales, delicate pretty birds; but they never flew beyond the roof and seldom higher than the fence, where a cat caught first one, then the other. This was one of the few sorrows of pigeon-keeping. The pleasures were innumerable. Chief of all was to set the birds free, watch them to the roof, clap till they flew round and round, draw them down by whistling and scattering seed. The mere purchasing of seed out of my pocket-money was a pleasure, especially as I was always experimenting with my own fancifully proportioned mixtures of dari, barley, maize, tares, and peas. Even the four useless eggs laid by a devoted c
ouple of hens were not thrown away on me: I discovered that no young ever came from them, and thereafter I diligently blew every one and treasured them. The great excitement was tempting a stray bird down with the rest into the pigeon house. Only once did I have a stray safely trapped and housed. She was for me a bird of mark, with the name of the Columbusian Society on her wings;1 kept her proudly with infinite expectation of her offspring. I was disappointed. For her one pair of fertile eggs I could not leave patiently to hatch. As soon as the young began to make a stir in them I answered them by chipping the shell with a pin; they were pricked and died unborn.
The rabbits were less interesting. But they were possessions. I learnt to handle them in the right manner. It was something to bury one from time to time. Also the business of rabbit-keeping took me to new country. One of our servants had a brother-in-law in Battersea who was a fancier, and I used to go down there to see his animals, and occasionally to buy one. One of the shops in his neighbourhood sold bran or pollard more cheaply. Such were my triumphs. And I remember that once when coming home from a visit to this man I found in my overcoat pocket a sum of money amounting to about a couple of shillings. Probably it was the change from some purchase for my mother which I had forgotten to hand over. It happened a second time. I mention only for the sake of pointing out that after the first surprise at each find I had a feeling of good fortune, mysterious indeed but not puzzling. I believe that I really thought the money had entered my pocket by some unique, magic accident.
My companions were now boys exclusively. I had no sisters; my girl cousins I saw but two or three times in all my childhood; none of my friends had sisters of their own age; my father and mother had but a few close acquaintances, who rarely came to the house and hardly ever brought their children, boys or girls, with them. Mabel and I had forsaken one another. If we met we smiled without words, without stopping. Then there were the servants. Usually one general servant shared the work of the house with my mother, everything except the washing. That was done by a woman who came over from Lambeth every week on Mondays. Her great red arms and her clean rapid ways awed me, her glass of beer and plate of bread and cheese in the middle of the morning awed and delighted me. Her rule lasted for many years; the servants rarely stayed more than a year or two. Their names, Eliza, Emily, Jane, Martha, call up individual but indefinite images of the bodies and natures of those girls: Eliza, grey-eyed, round-faced, bustling, laughing; religious Emily, cross-eyed, mild, severe; clever Jane, white, hazel-eyed, pretty but with a large nose and a tendency to a cold; Martha, Irish, blackhaired, always talking or singing her song of
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 53