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Text originally published in 1934 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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A LONDON CHILD OF THE SEVENTIES
by
M. V. Hughes
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
PREFACE 4
I. ‘A Star Danced’ 5
II. Ups and Downs 12
III. Round the Year 17
IV. Sailing Near the Wind 23
V. Up to Eleven 30
VI. School-days 39
VII. Sunday 48
VIII. Callers 54
IX. A. Long Railway journey 59
X. Reskadinnick 64
XI. Outdoor Doings 71
XII. Indoor Doings 82
XIII. A Family Club 87
XIV. A Last Christmas 94
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 99
PREFACE
NONE of the characters in this book are fictitious. The incidents, if not dramatic, are at least genuine memories. Expressions of jollity and enjoyment of life are understatements rather than overstatements. We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people. It occurred to me to record our doings only because, on looking back, and comparing our lot with that of the children of today, we seemed to have been so lucky. In writing them down, however, I have come to realize that luck is at one’s own disposal, that ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’. Bring up children in the conviction that they are lucky, and behold they are. But in our case high spirits were perhaps inherited, as my story will show.
DON PEDRO. In faith, lady, you have a merry heart.
BEATRICE. Yea, my lord; I thank it, poor fool, it keeps on the windy side of care.
I. ‘A Star Danced’
A GIRL with four brothers older than herself is born under a lucky star. To be brought up in London, in the eighteen-seventies, by parents who knew how to laugh at both jokes and disasters, was to be under the influence of Jupiter himself.
This fell to my lot. My early memories run from 1870, when we moved into a big house in Canonbury, until 1879, when my happy childhood was abruptly ended. I hope to show that Victorian children did not have such a dull time as is usually supposed.
It is true that we had few toys, few magazines, few outside entertainments, and few means of getting about. But we got so much out of the few we had, by anticipation, by ‘saving up, by exhaustive observation of the shop windows, and by the utmost use of the things we did achieve, that the well-to-do child of today can never get the same kind of pleasure. The modern ready-made well-stocked farm-yard, stable, or railway station, after a few days’ admiration, asks for nothing but destruction, for there is nothing else to do about it.
For us, a large box of plain bricks was the foundation of all our doings. It served for railway stations, docks, forts, towers, and every kind of house. Another box of bricks, thin and flat with dove-tailed edges, enabled us to build long walls around our cities. Some two dozen soldiers, red for English and blue for French, mostly wounded and disarmed, carried out grand manœuvres on specimens of granite and quartz arranged on the mantelpiece, and were easily mobilized anywhere. A packing-case did for a shop, where goods of all kinds were sold for marbles or shells or foreign stamps. The whole room was occasionally the sea, where a chair turned upside down was the Great Eastern, well and truly launched on the floor, for laying the Atlantic cable. A fat Lemprière’s Dictionary did for a quay or a transport wagon or an enemy town.
We had several remains of ninepins, and plenty of marbles. I loved the colours of the marbles and furtively collected them. Their relative merits I knew, and how to prize a ‘blood alley’; but learn to play I never could, preferring to flick or throw the marble, instead of using the thumb in the masterly way that the boys insisted on.
A new toy was an event. Each one of our well-worn treasures must have made a sensation when it first arrived. One such event is graven on my memory. It was my fifth birthday, and I got up early and ran into my parents’ room to be greeted. Laid out on the floor was a large and resplendent horse and cart. The horse was dapple-grey, all prancing and eyeing me in a friendly, willing way. The bright yellow cart, whose new stickiness I can still feel, had a movable back-piece that you could do something with. It would ‘take off’, and if you moved a wooden pin the cart tipped up; then you said ‘gee-up’ to the horse and all the goods would fall out. I had seen it done in the street, and promised myself no end of pleasure carting bricks for the boys.
Whether by design or not, we were allowed almost unlimited freedom, to imperil our lives without any sense of fear, and to invent our own amusements. We never had a nurse, or a nursery, or any one to supervise us. Instead of this we were given a room to ourselves—all to ourselves. In this matter we were better off than any other children we knew then or have known since. For our parents did the thing thoroughly. They provided a large table, a warm carpet, a fire whenever we liked, a large ottoman for storage and to serve as a window-seat; and left everything else to us. We chose the wallpaper and put what pictures we liked on the walls.
This room, which became a happy memory for us all through our lives, was called the ‘study’—perhaps as a hint of its intention. The name added to its dignity without putting, as far as we were concerned, any notion of work into it. As time went on we did our home lessons in it, but the word ‘study’ is always associated in my mind with sheer fun.
So greatly was our possession of the study respected that I cannot remember my father or mother ever being in it, except on the occasions when they sat in the stalls during one of our theatrical displays, paying heavily for the privilege and for the programmes.
In one recess of the study there were four shelves, and by common consent each boy had one to himself. On his shelf he displayed his treasures. I remember the awe with which I gazed at my second brother’s box of mathematical instruments, with bright compasses fitted into blue velvet grooves, and an ivory ruler that shifted into two for some strange purpose. He also had a big magnifying glass, which I always imagined had to be used when one ‘magnified the Lord’ in church. Some geological specimens were also displayed, but seemed to me of no use except for building forts.
My third brother, Charles, had quite other tastes. He was all for colour and variety, and one never knew what he would do next. At one time he had a rage for churches, and used to visit all the places of worship in the neighbourhood to see what they did. Then he arranged a cross and candles and flowers on his shelf, and got bits of coloured silk from mother to make the correct liturgical changes, and I thus early learnt to expect purple in Lent, green for Trinity, and so on, and was able to impress many an elder who had ‘really never noticed’.
Ho
wever, the main attraction for us all was the window. Our house stood at the corner of two roads, and our window had a good view down most of the length of one of them—Grange Road, affording us plenty of information of the doings of our neighbours and any passers-by. Up and down there went, much oftener than today, the hawkers of various goods, each with an appropriate cry: ‘Flowers all a-blowing and a-growing’, ‘Ornaments for your fire-stove’ (unbelievably hideous streamers of coloured paper), ‘A pair of fine soles’, bird-cages, iron-holders, brooms, brushes, and baskets. The long, wailing cry was a signal for us to crowd on to the ottoman to watch. Seeing our faces, the hawker would stop, look up eagerly, and hold up his goods. Several times we sent one round to the back-door with the encouraging words ‘Mamma would like some.’ Then we went to the top of the stairs to listen to the drama below: the hawker telling the housemaid that the Missus said she wanted a bird-cage, pause for journey of inquiry to the Missus, indignant denials, the return, abusive language from the hawker, a slammed door, glee in the study.
My second brother, who liked to talk about ‘science’, brought out the idea one day that a stone, if you wrapped it in a cloth, wouldn’t break glass. We dared him to try it on the window. He said, oh yes, but perhaps it would be better to make it go some distance. We then suggested his trying it on the next-door-but-one’s conservatory. I ran down to fetch a stone from the garden, and this was duly tied up in his handkerchief. He had been dared, and from a ‘dare’ there was no retreat. Whizz it went—crash through the glass roof. At this with one accord we became absorbed in pursuits of a studious nature, and after a bit began to feel that the affair had blown over. But then came a message by the housemaid that Master Vivian was wanted in the dining-room. There sat a frail old lady with mother, who was holding the stone-laden handkerchief, marked with Vivian’s full name. Mother was breathing out the direst punishments on him, but the injured one was pleading that she only wanted it not to happen again, and it didn’t matter at all, that boys would be boys, bless them, she only wished she had a child of her own, and so on, until poor old Vivian was a mush of contrition.
In one of our amusements we were far ahead of the children of the time. My mother had a hobby, amounting to a passion, for water-colour painting, and she encouraged us in every way to draw and paint. She herself had a very large box of colours, and she gave me a little one made of wood, and a bigger, black-metal one to Charles, who could soon draw and paint far better than she could. She besought us at frequent intervals not to suck the brush. But you could never get a good point without sucking a bit, and since mother laid so much stress on the evil effects of green (instant death apparently in some cases), we came to think that the other colours were not so bad.
We were rich too in another way, richer, so far as I can observe, than the average children of today. Our parents had accumulated a large number of books, which we were allowed to browse in as much as we liked. Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Lamb, George Eliot, Tennyson, Byron, Coleridge, Disraeli, these were not ‘taught’ at school, or set as holiday tasks, but became part of our lives. The elder ones discussed them at table, and quoted from them, till the Micawbers and Becky Sharp and Lamb appeared to my childish mind as some former friends of mother’s, whom I recognized with delight later on when I read the books for myself. Rawdon was my eldest brother’s favourite, and I knew ‘same which I shot Captain Marker’ long before I had the faintest notion of its meaning.
Occasionally the discussions became acrimonious. My eldest brother was one day making disparaging remarks about Tennyson, and my mother, all agitated in defence of her idol, fetched his poems from the shelf, and with a ‘Listen now, children’ began to declaim Locksley Hall. When she reached ‘I to herd with narrow foreheads’ she burst out, flinging down the book, ‘What awful rubbish this is!’
That was one of the jolly points about mother—she never minded saying what a fool she had been, was always proud to learn anything from the boys, and never gave us the ‘Grownup people know best’ reproof.
I suppose there was a fear on my mother’s part that I should be spoilt, for I was two years younger than the youngest boy. To prevent this danger she proclaimed the rule ‘Boys first’. I came last in all distribution of food at table, treats of sweets, and so on. I was expected to wait on the boys, run messages, fetch things left upstairs, and never grumble, let alone refuse. All this I thoroughly enjoyed, because I loved running about, and would often dash up and down stairs just to let off my spirits. Of course mother came in for some severe criticism from relations in this matter, but I have never ceased to thank her for this bit of early training.
The boys never failed to smile their thanks, call me ‘good girl’, do anything for me that wanted a strong thumb or a long arm, and to bring me home something when they had been out and I was left at home. At one time, for instance, I collected threepenny bits, and Charles walked home one day rather than spend this, his last coin, on a tram, so that he might bring it to me.
I have never been able to decide which brother I liked best, for each had some special attraction for me. All four were absurdly unlike in character and appearance, and yet so close in age and size that no stranger could pick out the eldest.
First came Tom. His name was not the short for anything, although his school authorities, in inscribing a prize, tried to dignify it in Latin by rendering the dative ‘Tomato’, providing us with a nickname for him at once. Tom always took my part through thick and thin, and would take me into partnership when I lost heavily at vingt-et-un. He told me that he had kissed my head when I was only one night old. I found it hard to believe that I had ever been so young. ‘You couldn’t walk or talk then,’ he would say, ‘you couldn’t even sit up.’ ‘Oh, Tom,’ I would protest, ‘I could sit up!’
He used to take me on his knee and sing nursery rhymes or scraps from music-hall songs, jerking me up and down all the time. This he called doing the ‘Jackley Troop’, and I would clamour for it again and again.
My second brother had mother’s family name of Vivian. This I could not pronounce in my early days, and turned it into Dymond, which soon became Dym. He was the only one who took kindly to school-work, and devoted himself to mathematics. Reserved almost to being morose at times, he was a bit lonely, and was glad to have me as a confidante. He had a secret love of poetry, and would get me up into the study alone and read aloud to me. He had a marvellously modulated voice, now tender, now thunderous. As I sat on the floor in open-mouthed admiration, he let himself go, moving me to pity over Sir Federigo’s falcon, and to great excitement over the poor jester who cried out, ‘I am, I am the King!’
Sometimes, too, he would show me a real scientific experiment. One day he said, ‘Molly, would you like to see me turn water into wine, like it is in the Bible?’ And he held up two wine-glasses full of water. ‘Now watch,’ he said, as he poured both into a bigger glass. And actually as I looked the water turned into claret. After this I was ready to believe almost anything. But one day he tried my credulity too hard. With quite a straight face he told me that the Earth was always moving. If it had been one of the other boys, I should have enjoyed the joke, and turned it off with an easy laugh, for they were always taking me in over something. But I didn’t expect this from Dym, and his absurdity annoyed me. I can see myself now, in a starched pink frock sticking out all round, and a fat little bare leg with a white sock and shiny black shoe, stamping firmly on the floor and insisting, ‘It doesn’t, it doesn’t!’—as solid in my own conviction as ever Galileo was in his. Eppur NON si muove was my mental reservation.
My third brother, Charles, was the only clever one among us. He worked hard at music and painting, but at nothing else would he do a stroke that could be avoided. He was clever enough to make the tiniest bit of information do the work of volumes. He would find some remote fact about Zenobia or Savonarola, or someone like that, and then pretend to be shocked at the ignorance of those around him. Of course the family knew him, but his trick carried him far
with outsiders. He was known to boast that he had never failed in an examination, while the family knew that he had never been in for one. In our continual arguments Charles always seemed to come out top, and his criticisms were merciless. As for me, I was snubbed continually, especially if I fished for a compliment or showed any symptom of self-pity. If I appeared in a new hat (very rare) Charles would exclaim, ‘Well! of all the…” He often told me how plain I was, and prophesied that I would grow fat like Aunt Polly. But there was rich compensation for all this in the things he would draw for me, the tunes he would play for me to dance, and the long exotic stories he would tell me, in the style of the Arabian Nights, making them up as he went along. And he was kind in unexpected ways, and when people weren’t looking.
Nearest in age to me came Barnholt, and nearest in ideas and pleasant childishness. He had a sneaking interest in my dolls and foolish fancies. Lessons of all kinds were a never-ending burden to him. While Tom was good at Latin, Dym at mathematics, and Charles at music and drawing, poor old Barnholt shone in no direction. He would get me to hear him his ‘po’try’ and what he called ‘me drivtivs’—lists of words to be learnt by heart, all derived from some Latin root. The only poem I can recall is Wordsworth’s ‘Pet Lamb’. What anguish it cost him to get it right! I don’t think he ever got beyond the first verse. What insane master could set such a poem to healthy boys? The others used to tease him about it at meal-times, with invitations to ‘Drink, pretty creature, drink’. Chaff, of course, Barnholt enjoyed, as one of the alleviations of home life, but detentions at school—they were the curse.
While anything smelling of school-work was poison to Barnholt, any little job of practical work, any errand, any risky adventure proposed, and he was on the spot. ‘I say, Barney, do rope this box for me.’ ‘You might run and fetch me some stamps.’ ‘Look here, Barney go first.’ There was no record of a refusal.
A London Child of the Seventies Page 1