A London Child of the Seventies

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  Each number of The Bee was placed by my father’s side at the breakfast-table, that he might have the virgin glance. His genuine admiration and pride were ample reward for all our trouble. It was then passed round the family to be read in turn, and such care did we take of the five numbers we produced that they are still as clean today as when they left Tom’s hands, and the fifty years and more have hardly faded the ink. I am still fond of poring over them, all except Barnholt’s little essay, which I find too much of a human document…so many hours of his short life to have been spent in senseless detention!

  XIV. A Last Christmas

  THE jolliest winter of our childhood was in 1878. We had only given up making our magazine because real work was too pressing. Tom was at the last phase for his B.A. and Dym was in full hopes of his Cambridge scholarship. Charles had left school in order to give his whole time to his water-colour painting. Most of his days were spent in town, copying the technique of David Cox, Turner, and Muller, and we all looked forward to seeing what he brought home every evening. He had sold so many of his own original sketches that he confidently hoped to make his living in that way.

  Of the four boys Barnholt was perhaps the happiest. Released at last from his eternal ‘detentions’, he had been taken from school and placed in a shipping office, with the prospect of next year fulfilling the dream of his life by going to sea. As mother had predicted, he was the first of us to earn his living, to have a real salary, to be a ‘man of means’. I fancy that he had suffered a good deal from having to wear the other boys’ left-offs, for the first thing he did was to buy quite quietly a new suit. I can see him now as he walked into breakfast in it. It was a grey tweed, bristling with newness, and we were all full of admiration as he went off with my father ‘to the City’, while mother proudly demanded to know what she had told us.

  And I too was happy in the first flush of my school-days, involving important ‘homework’ at the study table. At my October birthday the family came out strong: Tom bought a papier-mâché pencil-box that shut firmly and had Chinese figures doing something on the lid. Inside were three compartments. In the longest of these Charles put five new lead pencils (ranging from HH to BB). In the middle-sized division Dym put a penknife, and in the smallest division Barnholt put a piece of soft india-rubber. Mother gave me a pair of scissors to be entirely my own, and my father brought me home the loveliest umbrella ever designed. It was of dark blue silk, and had a carved ivory handle. He must have given a lot for it, and I could never bring myself to use it. I carried it to school every day firmly grasped round the middle, but never opened it. When I was driven, one day much later, by a sudden shower to loosen the elastic band and spring it open, what was my dismay to find the silk in shreds where my hand had worn it.

  The pencil-box was the envy of my school-fellows. The boys were greatly tickled at the way in which I assigned a special pencil for use in the various subjects—a history pencil, a geography pencil, and so on. ‘I say, Molly, lend us your Scripture pencil,’ Dym would say, for he knew that was an H, and good for his geometry figures. They all took an amused interest in my lessons and my ‘little friends’, as they called my school-fellows. My father, too, used to ask what I was doing, and one day, by way of reply, I inflicted on him the recitation of a whole poem about Mary Queen of Scots. This began:

  I looked far back into other years, and lo, in bright array.

  I haven’t the faintest notion now of what I saw in bright array, but the closing lines have stuck in my memory. They refer to the blood of the queen, and run thus:

  The noblest of the Stuart race, the fairest Earth hath seen,

  Lapped by a dog! Go, think of it, in silence and alone,

  Then weigh against a grain of sand the glories of a throne.

  Neither I nor my father thought of carrying out these instructions, but he gave me sixpence and said it was very good.

  He used to help me with my sums, going very slowly with his explanations and telling me about things they did ‘in the City’. He taught me how to write quickly by never taking off my pen in the middle of a word, and gave me ‘transubstantiation’ to practise on. I aimed at copying his handwriting, which I still think the best I have ever seen. When he noted my ambition he said, ‘Yes, all right, only be sure you never copy my, or any one’s, signature—never on any account, even in fun.’ So he could be quite serious at times, but as a rule he couldn’t resist taking me in, because I was such easy game. ‘I saw a nigger in the City today who was so black that charcoal made a white mark on him.’ How that worried me! But I took in as Gospel the story of the man who bought a bottle of hair-restorer, dropped it on the door-step while he was fumbling for his key, and spilt it all—only to find next morning a fine hair mat outside.

  My ideas about the City were confused. Sunday showed me a peaceful wilderness, where one walked in the middle of the road. Barnholt’s accounts were of crowds of people, and the following scrap of conversation between father and mother didn’t help matters.

  ‘Seen anyone in the City today, Tom dear?’

  ‘Not a soul, except old Herring.’

  I pictured a herring suspended somewhere on a string across the street. Mother didn’t seem in the least surprised at the lack of population.

  To us one November evening there came a casual knock at the door, and who should walk in but Tony. Better than the comfort of being met at the station was the joy to her of giving us all such a surprise. As we crowded round her she explained that she had just ‘slipped away’ to spend a week or two with us. A telegram would seem to have been the natural thing to send, but in those days telegrams were nearly always reserved for disasters, so that the yellow envelope in itself was a shock, and care was taken that the person to whom it was delivered should be seated ready for the worst. Tony laughingly said she was sure of a welcome, and knew that mother could always throw up a bed.

  She then disclosed that she had not come alone, but was to be shortly followed by a barrel of apples and a young pig, coming on by goods train. The barrel was delivered first and was installed in the china-closet near the front door, and we had full permission to help ourselves whenever we liked. The young pig, technically known as a ‘porker’, arrived wrapped in canvas on the carrier’s shoulder, and was laid on the kitchen table ready for cutting up. It seemed to involve the whole household in feverish activity for days. There was glory for the servants, since all regular work was pushed aside in the effort to find big earthenware pans, to fetch in saltpetre and treacle, and clean up. The boys were summoned to help cut the big joints, and to pack up some of them to be sent to relations. I helped chop up the small meat ready for mother and Tony to make into sausages and pork pies.

  Naturally Tony wanted to see the shops, and as soon as the Christmas holidays began I was allowed to go with her and mother to the West End. Tony was all for taking hansoms. As she pointed out, a bus can be taken any day—a holiday was a holiday, and she didn’t believe in doing things by halves. She argued that it is the regular expenses that one should worry about, not the occasional. So she took hansoms right and left, and I can still recall the luxurious feeling of snuggling down in a hansom between her and mother, to be wafted exactly where we wanted to go. I could just see the toss of the horse’s head and could hear the klip-klop of his hoofs and the cheerful jingle of his bells. It is amusing to reflect now that the bells on a hansom were put there as a warning to pedestrians to get out of the way of such swift vehicles. Those were the days when a man with a red flag used to walk in front of a steam-roller. I wonder what Tony would say to the traffic in Piccadilly today. On one of her later visits to London I took her on the top of a bus, to see some of the life of the town. As I called her attention to this and that, she said, ‘Don’t ask me to look, dear. If I take my eye off the driver he will surely run into something.’

  What she suffered in a hansom I can’t imagine, for she had no control over the driving, even with her eye. But in 1878 the traffic was laughably simple,
and the only likelihood of an accident was the slipping of a horse on a wet road. Even then the driver from his high seat could usually pull the horse to his feet again. But mother would never let the glass window in front be used, however hard it might rain, because a sudden fall of the horse might easily throw us headlong through the glass.

  A morning’s shopping was all we could manage for one day, for, strange as it seems now, the big shops had no restaurants, no rest-rooms, no conveniences for toilet, however dire one’s need. The first tea-shop was opened at London Bridge, out of sheer pity for lady customers!

  Much energy was spent in restraining Tony from buying too many presents, for the shops were so enticing. We found it safer to take her for expeditions to Epping, Hadley Woods, and Kew. One day I was allowed as a great treat to take her up to Hampstead Heath all by myself. Inducing her to tell me stories, I distracted her attention (and apparently my own) from the route we were following. At a strategic point I stopped suddenly, looked bewildered, and declared that I had lost the way. In reality I had led her in and out among short lanes and little paths, to and fro, and was all the time within easy distance of the station. At first I enjoyed seeing how ‘hurried’ she became, but when she talked of looking for a policeman, finding a post office, and telegraphing to mother, I thought it was time to discover the station, and with a bright ‘Here it is after all I’ ushered her into the booking-office.

  As Christmas drew nearer we had several evening gatherings, not formal enough to call parties, for the boys and their friends. Charles called them ‘Robin Adair’ parties, because a girl we knew used to trill forth this song on the slightest pressure. Aunt Polly would always oblige with ‘Tell them they need not come wooing to me’, occasioning many ribald remarks from the boys. Another song that became familiar was ‘She wore a wreath of roses’. No one knew why she had this headgear, and when the poor fellow saw her again she had changed it. ‘Methinks,’ he sang, ‘I see her now, with a wreath of orange-blossoms upon her marble brow.’ One evening my father was begged to sing a song, and what was our astonishment when he stood out on the hearth-rug and without any accompaniment gave forth ‘The Bells of Aberdovey’, in glorious rich tones. Seeing every one’s pleasure no doubt heartened him on, and his careless unconcern enabled him to get the full effect of the lovely Welsh words.

  One of Tony’s presents was a magic lantern, which she delivered before Christmas, so that the boys might practise it beforehand. Wonders are so thick today that no child can understand my thrill at the darkened study and the sight of coloured figures chasing one another in mid-air.

  Everything combined to make this Christmas (the last we were to have all together) the best of all. Ambitious now with their acting, the boys attempted a real play—Box and Cox. Tom and Dym took the title-roles, and Charles that of Mrs. Bouncer. Happily for me there was no heroine, and I could enjoy it all to the full. There was Dym cooking a chop over the study fire, and only leaving in the nick of time before Tom came in all hatted and overcoated, and there was Charles always in a dither. The whole thing was a success, loudly applauded by the grown-ups, including Tony and several others. A magic-lantern display followed, and then we all assembled downstairs for the presentation of Christmas gifts.

  This was on a larger scale than ever before. The boys joined forces to give me Aventures d’Alice au Pays des Merveilles. They were proud of this book because the translation had been done by Henri Bué, the French master at Merchant Taylors’. My curiosity was to see how he had put into French ‘Off with his head!’ and I was amply satisfied with the funny way he rendered it.

  Barnholt guessed rightly that I wanted a more frivolous note, so he added to my pile a mouse that would run along the floor when wound up. All other presents have slipped my memory, with the grand exception of those we children gave my father. We had each bought him a book, and my vividest memory of him is that jolly scene. There he sat, gazing at the pile of five books—too pleased to speak, too pleased to touch them.

  The November of 1879 was cold and dark with fogs far worse than ever happen now. We used to look out to see torches being carried, and making ghastly glares in the deep yellow. One evening my father did not return. He had been run over and instantly killed. They did not dare to tell mother. She went next day into the City to inquire, and was told by my uncle that Tom had been called away on business to Doncaster. And she waited somehow till two days had passed, when they came and broke the news. During the years that followed she used to sit in the dusk, in a chair facing the gate, as she had waited for Barnholt years before. I think she almost hoped that the past was only a nightmare, and that she would surely see my father coming up the garden path with his springy step, and would hear his familiar knock.

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