IX. A LASTING ACQUAINTANCE: RICHARD JEFFERIES
When Fred was not free I had some very different company. One acquaintance I had made at Swindon was a stout coarse lad of fifteen or sixteen who had been in prison and had plenty of spare time. His name also was Fred. He would do almost anything to please me, from fishing with me all day, to killing a neighbour’s cat for me to skin. Moreover, he always behaved to me with the utmost decency, faith and honesty. I only surmised that he was not a saint. The report that he had been in prison was against him; and there was another thing. Sometimes a big half-witted tousled girl and a young sister used to pass us on the canal-side, and one day I and Fred, who knew them, rambled about with them in the gorse, I looking for late linnets’ nests, Fred frequently importuning the elder girl but with no success.
But a more entertaining and lasting acquaintance was an old man whom I called Dad, in the Wiltshire style, almost from the first day. I remember him first as a stiff straight man, broad-shouldered and bushy bearded, holding his rod out and watching his float very intently. Suddenly up went the rod and a little roach flew high over his head into the hedge behind. ‘Daddy bin and caught one!’ shouted the boy with me. We laughed and the old man laughed too. As every day he fished not far from me and Fred or whoever was my companion, we began to chat. We used to sit and eat our dinner together. He being toothless had to chew prodigiously, his nose and his beard almost meeting at each bite, to get through his brown bread and watercress. The bread he brought with him, the watercress he gathered from the brooks. His eating grimace amused me, his gravity, the simplicity of the meal, and his thanks to God for it impressed me. At that time he lived with his wife under the roof of a son who was in the factory. The rod and half a loaf helped him to fill up his time with obvious satisfaction, and what he caught he kept, however small. Very soon I sought him out and got him to walk with me when I was tired of fishing. I shared my doughy cake with him, or if we had a meal at a village shop I paid for the tea and bread and butter and egg and lardy cake. He knew the names of most birds and could imitate their cries: his imitations of the jackdaw calling his name, and of the young rook crying and swallowing a worm at the same time, were wonderful. The flowers, too, he knew, both the common pretty flowers and those whose virtues he had read of in Culpeper’s Herbal. With dried and powdered dock root and with extracts of leaves, flowers or bark, he composed dark medicinal-looking draughts. His ointment made of lard scented with elder flower was delicious. Then he had a way with country people. He spoke to everyone. All the old men to him were ‘Dad’ and the old women ‘Granny’ and the younger men ‘young man’. He would stop by a stonebreaker to say, ‘How many ups and downs o’ that to a pound of mutton, young man?’ The pity was that he was too poor to get friendly with keepers. If we were caught trespassing he was no good. Out we had to go, the old man muttering, ‘We beant poaching’, and the keeper retorting, ‘Looks very much like it wi’ they thick sticks.’ He was a much better hand with the labourers and especially the women with whom he had an ineffably grave knowing manner, many times they gave us tea and an egg which the fowl had just laid in the cupboard; and the son would tell us perhaps where there was a magpie’s nest. The only man he seemed to feel himself above was the yellow half-bred gypsy youth, the ‘diddikai’, who used to slouch by us sometimes. Dad had done some poaching in his younger days. Odd-job man under a wood-ward, militiaman, and latterly outdoor assistant to grocers, he had not had time to become very respectable. So he was the first man old enough to be my grandfather with whom I was on thoroughly good easy terms. He did not hide anything or invent a moral code for my benefit. He would say of the round-shouldered sour man living alone in the sham-Gothic house with the orchard, ‘It’s the women has put old Dicky’s back up’, and leave me to make what I could of it. Or he shook his head solemnly as he saw the once decent middle aged gaffer from the works going up the canal-side with an obvious loose woman and later on emerging from the ash copse. It merely amused me. Sex was alluring and amusing, whenever it was revealed, because the whole grown-up world for the benefit of the young was endeavouring to keep up the appearance of doing without sex. Thus Dad’s extraordinary freedom was equally amusing and alluring. At first I supposed him to be a wicked old man until I came to believe that all men were radically like him but most of them inferior in honesty. He was not in the least unseemly or obtrusive, but grave and roused very rarely to his Shakespearian laughter and the words, ‘Well, well, what a thing it is!’ Nor did he ever use foul language. What is more, he spoke what he thought, whether his sons, or anyone else such as myself, were there, which was very new to me. I had always had an idea that either parents were not of the same weak flesh as children or that they were religiously obliged to conceal the same: John who had seen his father’s nakedness had committed a sort of sin. These three sons of Dad’s treated him as an equal, but in misfortune. I got to know them also. The middle one with whom he lived used to fish in the evenings in a more business-like way. He could not, however, resist a shot with a catapult at any rat swimming across at a convenient distance. Once he drove a large bullet clean through a rat, and of course I had to have a catapult of the same strength. The eldest son was a bad old Indian soldier often out of a job. The youngest was a rambling character. I sometimes saw him as brown as a berry from harvesting, his large blue eyes glittering, his fair hair bleached like hay. As they were all friendly I had rather, if I had to be indoors, be with them than with my grandmother.
John meantime had covered himself with glory by catching a jack of eight pounds somewhere in Kent. Nevertheless we did not break our custom of not fishing in autumn or winter. Whenever I was not bound to play in a football match I spent my half-holidays with John, walking, to Merton or Wimbledon, or taking the train to South Croydon and exploring southwards and eastwards. We had no single definite object now that no eggs were to be found. Talking, and looking at the earth and the sky, we just walked about until it was dark. Students we were not: nothing was pursued to the uttermost. We merely became accustomed to the general life of the common birds and animals, and to the appearances of trees and clouds and everything upon the surface that showed itself to the naked eye. Some rare thrush or robin we might stop to listen to; or we might watch a wren threading a bush or a tit on a birch-spray, or look at a mossy greenfinch’s nest or climb up with some sort of unfounded hope to a big nest which had escaped us in spring; but for the most part we were moving and usually fast. When it froze we were content with what we saw as we stalked up and down the round ice of Beverley Brook. Only at night did we join the throng of skaters pure and simple. If the weather was bad and we were not together and no school work had to be done, I read books of travel, sport and natural history. I remember those of Waterton, Thomas Edward, Buckland, Wallace, Charles Kingsley, but above all Richard Jefferies. If I say little of Jefferies it is because not a year passed thereafter without many copious draughts of him and I cannot pretend to distinguish amongst them. But very soon afterwards I was writing out in each one of his books and elsewhere — as in a cousin’s album — when I had the opportunity, those last words of The Amateur Poacher: ‘Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.’ They were a gospel, an incantation. What I liked in the books was the free open-air life, the spice of illegality and daring, roguish characters — the opportunities so far exceeding my own, the gun, the great pond, the country home, the apparently endless leisure — the glorious moments that one could always recapture by opening the Poacher — and the tinge of sadness here and there as in the picture of the old moucher perishing in his sleep by the lime kiln, and the heron flying over in the morning indifferent. Obviously Jefferies had lived a very different boyhood from ours, yet one which we longed for and supposed ourselves fit for. He had never had to wear his best clothes for twelve or fourteen hours on Sunday. Enfo
rced attendances at church and Sunday school could not have been known to him. The crowd parading in their Sunday-best clothes along the walks of the Commons was impossible in that southern county.
I had begun to write accounts of my walks in an approach as near as possible to the style of Jefferies. They had grown out of the school essay on holidays which I was able to take some pains over, as, for example, in arrangement and in making a dignified conclusion, with a Latin quotation. After the last summer holiday I won a botany book as a prize at the Sunday school with one essay of this kind. The minister encouraged me in my outdoor tastes with much kindness and the best of his ability. He even persuaded the editor of a children’s paper to print my descriptions of country walks. But like all other grown-up people he inspired me with discomfort, strangeness, a desire to escape. I could never answer him naturally. I unconsciously affected a suitable solemnity and what I imagined to be an adult way of looking at things. My face was very easily robbed of all expression by fear of any kind, and this expressionless expression bore a resemblance to pathetic gravity, though out of fear and a dislike of inflicting visible pain I always seemed to agree and obey: then ran out into the dark street and round a corner to laugh with John or Jimmy. However, I think the minister had something to do with the essays I wrote and the natural history notes I kept day by day besides the almost daily entries in a general diary.
No book read at school was to me ever anything like as delightful as The Amateur Poacher. Of schoolwork I did only what, in order to avoid much trouble with masters and parents, I had to do. I did not like not being able to answer a question, particularly if another boy could. Therefore I learnt nothing thoroughly. I merely kept a place at the top of the form in the matter of geography, history, and English, and not far from the top altogether. Therefore, also, I did not lose my scholarship or get more than a few stern five minutes from my father and my form-master. I was praised, too, as I remember clearly, for to listen to praise gave me an aching pain between the legs. But if I made an effort, it was with half my mind, without ambition. My father wanted me to go on to a Public School and I received special lessons in Latin verse and in Greek. But Greek grammar, Herodotus and Ovid were nuisances: I attended to them only because to ignore them altogether would have brought worse nuisances. I was thinking all the time about John and Jefferies and Merton and fishing and bird-nesting. Yet I believed that I could do better at lessons if I wished, and it was one of my proud moments when I saw my name at the top of a list in Latin, with an adverse comment by the master alongside it. Excelling the rest, I had done badly.
My father made efforts to stimulate interests. He set me learning botany from books and lectures: I learnt nothing but a few names which I could not forget. He used to talk to me of books and take me to lectures. At Kelmscott House I heard Grant Allen recommending State endowment of literary genius: I saw William Morris and I was pleased and awed. But nothing I ever heard at home attracted me to literature or the arts. I saw my father reading Wilhelm Meister in German: it seemed to be wonderful, tedious, the sort of thing a grown-up person would do. Nor did I meet boys who cared for books that were not stories or natural history.
There were, however, several hundred books at home, and among them volumes of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, and Browning. From the Tennyson, which was a gilt-edged selection belonging to my mother, I had had to learn in parts of In Memoriam for recitation, as my next brother had done The Captain: A Legend of the Navy. Exactly when and why I began to read some of the other poems with pleasure, I cannot say, but it was when I was about fifteen. I know that I read the May Queen over and over again. I enjoyed the beauty of spring mixed with the sadness of early death. I liked the soft sadness as I had liked the severer sadness of
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I liked saying the saddest lines aloud with appropriate solemnity. I liked the name Effie. So on Sunday when Jimmy and I walked out in our best clothes I took Tennyson with me. The fact that there might be a girl there whom I wanted to know did not enable me to stand much of the Sunday crowd, and very soon I turned aside and began to read Tennyson, sometimes aloud. Jimmy scoffed impatiently. Neither the verses nor my indulgence in them pleased or interested him at all. It was long before I learnt to escape from Sunday by going into the country. Chapel and Sunday school broke the heart of the day. At most I got away sometimes to Wimbledon, or, starting very early, walked to Kingston and back in time for morning service. As John was equally enslaved, I still sometimes strolled out with Jimmy, fortified by Tennyson.
I am almost certain that the reading of poetry was connected with my liking for a girl named Blanche. At any rate I was delighted to find in King John the lines
If lusty love should go in quest of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanch?
She was a tall thin freckled girl of about my own age with good rather large features, dark hair and grey eyes, and an austere expression. Always in her company for the Sunday parade, or ordinary walk, were two fair-haired sisters, her cousins, one distinctly younger, one older than she was. John and I admired them. We sought every opportunity of meeting them and taking off our hats to them and getting smiles from them. Though they usually approached us with suppressed smiles and were certainly not exceptionally inaccessible we were slow to get on speaking terms with them. When we did we had no idea what to say; not had they. If one of us said something about the weather and got an answer it was enough. If silence lasted long they were certain to giggle. Dread of being met by their parents or friends of our own added still more to the awkwardness of these short meetings, though when we did all run into Blanche’s mother she had nothing but smiles for us. She was a red-faced woman whom we regarded as in every way inferior to our own mothers: in fact the girls themselves were a shade below what we desired, though we never confessed it or that any greater bliss was possible than in being accepted by them as sweethearts. I hardly imagined that I should ever kiss Blanche: to hear her deep voice, to receive her grave smiles, often would have been enough. And so concentrated was I upon her that I treated contemptuously a pretty lusty full-lipped red-cheeked girl who sometimes waylaid me and sometimes sent messages by a young sister. I was more tempted by the prostitutes, coarse, middle-aged, ill-dressed, who addressed me as ‘darling’ and used to walk up and down out of darkness to the light of a lamp and back again, in the less frequented Common pathways. But I was too timid and too ignorant.
X. PUBLIC SCHOOL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
With Blanche I never got beyond buying her roses and lilies of the valley, and once an expensive prayer-book. That was when I had already gone on to a Public School. I had failed to win a scholarship; only in English did I make any show at all: and I entered a form consisting of a few boys who had won or were going to compete for history scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge. All were older by two or three years than myself. I had never before met boys like them. They not only read many books and saw many plays, and held strong opinions about them, but they argued about persons and events and movements in English and foreign literature. When Maupassant died they discussed his merits as a story-writer. When one of them, in answer to a question, got out of me the statement — which was not true — that we had Meredith’s books at home, he smiled with delight and said something to the effect that a house containing Meredith’s work was blessed. I continued to read chiefly Jefferies and the naturalists, whom these boys knew nothing of. ‘What are you reading, Thomas?’ asked one of the boys who already wore a scholar’s gown. ‘The Gamekeeper at Home,’ said I. ‘The gamekeeper’s place is the woods,’ said he. And I kept silence, not venturing to remark that the woods were his home.
The whole school impressed and alarmed me. The head master, a thick old grey-bearded heavy-lidded gruff-voiced man with creased florid face and creased black clothes, impressed and alarmed me. I should have done anything he to
ld me, but he never told me to do anything except, ‘Speak up. I’m an old man.’ Once or twice he glanced at my Greek as I sat with a very few other boys in the great hall. I knew nothing; I was humbled but hardly stirred to effort. The hundreds of boys also humbled me. Many of them wore men’s clothes, carried their books in bags like clerks’, and seemed to me grimly earnest and thinking only of work and success. Many others looked well off, spoke in more refined voices than I was used to. I came alone in the morning, and in the afternoon I went home alone, often in a railway carriage containing three or four schoolfellows, but alone, in a state of discomfort which would I imagined have been multiplied if they had taken any notice of me, which they never once did, in spite of my morbid looking out for signs that they noticed my discomfort. During the middle of the day I was alone: I stood alone watching Rugby football or practice for the sports. For most of the boys in my form went home to lunch; the rest also disappeared. If I had lunch at school I sat alone and was spoken to only once. Opposite me sat several much older boys whose serious faces and eager voices in argument fascinated me, so that I could not but stare, until one day one of them, a pale black-haired youth with strong lean scowling features, asked me why the devil I couldn’t mind my own business. Perhaps it was to avoid this school meal that I took to having lunch out, or, rather, buying a few buns to eat in the class room while I read Jefferies. The reasons why I did not play games are that I was never asked to and was shy, and that I was unaccustomed to Rugby football. When I was not reading or watching games I walked along the far side of the river watching the gulls and swans, sometimes in such wretchedness that I wanted to drown myself. My form-master, seeing me reading when he came in long before the afternoon school was to begin, asked me what I did with myself, did I ever skate or take any decent exercise. He was abrupt and looked contemptuous. I muttered something about skating and country walks. My wrists and hands and arms were always decorated with scratches during the bird-nesting season, but of course he knew nothing of that. Nor had he seen the words which I had written, perhaps not quite without ostentation, in the worst possible Latin on the flyleaf of my algebra book: ‘I love birds more than books.’ Seen by a clever boy who sat next to me in the mathematical class, these words caused a contemptuous smile in him and in me one of sickly shame for the badness of the Latin. I felt unimportant, isolated, out of place, and only not despised because I was utterly unnoticed; but afterwards I developed some sort of pride in the great names connected with the school in past centuries, and also in its present successes at the universities, on the football field and elsewhere. Naturally then I felt extraordinarily unimportant. I had now a faint ambition, both definite and indefinite, to do something in connection with learning or literature. My father wished me to try for a history scholarship and I occasionally read as hard as it was possible to do without any interest in history beyond the attempt to memorize facts. I suppose there never were duller books than Bright’s England, Kitchin’s France, Lodge’s Europe, anybody’s Political Economy (Marshall), and I had no idea of history beyond assimilating these. When I was persuaded to propose something at the debating society which included my class and a few of our friends, my opponent began by congratulating me on my ‘admirable summary of Bright’. It had simply not occurred to me that there was anything to do but summarize Bright. I had never had any grounds for differing from the historian I had last read. The other boys either had enormous appetites for books of many kinds, or they had native wit. I seemed to have nothing.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 58