A Traveller's Life (7 page)

I took more notice of the children of the poor than of the grown-ups, because they were nearer my level in the world in terms of feet and inches, and therefore more often confronted me. I remember the boys more than I remember the girls because the boys tended to move about in gangs. I remember them, not all of course, but many, as being pale and thin, some of them almost transparent, so that looking at their faces with the skin drawn tight over them and their cropped, sometimes shaven heads above, I had the impression of being able to see their skulls through the skin.

But, although some were painfully thin, with bulgy, raw-looking
knees protruding below the ungainly-looking shorts they wore, cut down from the discarded trousers of their elder brothers, they were tough, as tough as those of their fathers who had survived the war. Among themselves they fought like ferrets, on the pavements, in the gutters, anywhere, not caring what damage they did to one another or their already tattered clothes, putting in the boot, as it is now called, when they were able, employing methods that at Colet Court were regarded as unfair, except by the gangs of bullies whose techniques surpassed anything the poor could think up at that time in terms of the infliction of physical pain. Their parents fought, too. Their fights were not the lightning affairs their children were adept in, as if they were torpedo-boats racing in to an enemy anchorage and doing the greatest amount of damage in the least possible time and then getting out again. They were lumbering, major actions between what were more like dreadnoughts, that went on until one or other of the participants was rendered
hors de combat
, or until the police arrived. Such encounters in the streets of Hammersmith were awful to watch, at least to me, because the idea of grown-ups of whatever condition, who were presumed to know better, actually fighting one another, pulling great tufts of one another's hair out sometimes if they were women, was unthinkable.

The children of the poor, boys and girls alike, were resourceful. They had to be. Apart from marbles and iron hoops they had scarcely any bought toys; or if they had they must have kept them indoors as I never saw any. They tied lengths of ragged rope to the crossbars of the street lamps and swung on them, or else used them for skipping. In the autumn the boys played conkers, as we did at Colet Court, bashing away at one another's iron-hard, specially cured horse chestnuts on a string until one or other of them broke. They also played various street and pavement games, such as hopscotch, according to the season of the year, marking
out the courts with chalk. If I and my friends used to chalk out the same games on the pavements in Riverview Gardens, residents complained and we got ticked off by the porters, who were numerous. What I envied them were the scooters and little carts, made for them by their fathers or elder brothers, using wood from old packing cases and wheels from discarded roller skates. These scooters made what to me was a wonderfully deafening noise as their owners scooted along the pavements or, more daringly, along the road. I thought them far superior to my own bought scooter from Hamleys which, although possibly a little faster, was depressingly noiseless, being fitted with rubber wheels. In the little carts, which were almost equally noisy, they used to pull their younger brothers and sisters, most of whom should have been in prams if they had had prams, all the way from Hammersmith up Castlenore to Barnes Common and back, a couple of miles each way. How these infants survived such jolting journeys is a mystery.

They were brave, too. In summer, when it was high tide at Hammersmith, some of the boys who could not have been more than nine or ten, used to dive into the then indescribably filthy water from the parapet of the bridge, a good fifteen feet above it, and then, never having been taught to swim properly, dog-paddle to the embankment. They used to do this until a policeman, or a policewoman wearing a helmet like an upturned basin, a huge blue serge skirt and big black boots, used to appear and chase them into Hammersmith, still naked, clutching their ragged clothes, but never catching them.

Besides being tough, resourceful and brave they were also, so far as I was concerned, and anyone who travelled the same route to school as I did, extremely nasty. In the summer of 1928, for the first time I was allowed to go to school without Kathy, providing that I travelled by the back street route, avoiding Hammersmith Broadway, in which my parents were always
convinced that I would be run over. Sometimes, but not always, I travelled with another boy who lived nearby us, whose parents bound him to the same conditions.

To us, the perils of this back street route were far more real than any of the risks our parents imagined us running in Hammersmith Broadway, such as being knocked down by a bus or tram. It took us through the heart of territory in which the poor and underprivileged lay in wait while on what appeared to be their more leisurely way to their own schools. Travelling with Kathy, herself a member of the working class, I now realized was like having been provided with some sort of
laisser passer
. In any event, she stood no nonsense from anyone and on the only occasion she did have trouble, when what seemed to me a very large boy, one as tall as she was, crept up behind her and pulled her long hair, she gave him such a resounding slap in the face that he went off howling. Now, using the same route, we encountered the enemy, an enemy waiting to jeer at us, shove us about, smash our straw hats in or pinch our caps, according to the time of year.

If there were only a couple, and they were not too large, we used to stand and fight. We were quite good at fighting, in fact, for much of the time we did little else in the breaks at Colet Court, and quite often we succeeded in sending them away blubbing. Surprisingly, for all their ferocity, they seemed less able than we were to put up with physical pain.

If we did win such a victory, however, our triumph was usually short-lived. No later than the next day we would find ourselves the subject of a major ambush by members of the same tribe. This could be very serious unless we happened to be armed with cricket bats, or even school satchels would do if they were sufficiently packed with books, to bash the boys with. Otherwise the only thing to do was to run for it: capture meant torture, even if it was only of an improvised, not very refined sort, which it more
or less had to be in an open street. (At Colet Court, where there were places hidden from view in the playground, to which few masters ever penetrated, torture could mean having drawing pins pushed into the palms of one's hands.) Even so, we sometimes arrived at school, ourselves blubbing, with bloody noses and straw hats stove in and, worst of all, late, in which case we were reported. It is perhaps not surprising that when things got really bad we took to crossing Hammersmith Broadway by the forbidden route.

However, these misfortunes were soon forgotten travelling home to Ther Boiler in the evenings on top of a No. 9 or 73 open bus, bombarding other boys on the tops of other buses with peashooters or squirting water pistols at them; whistling at the girls from St Paul's Girls' School, with whom social intercourse while travelling was discouraged; hiding under the canvas covers, which could be put up over the seats in wet weather, to avoid paying the fare; or better still, waiting for the buses of the Westminster or Premier pirate bus companies, that were fighting a battle for survival against the London General Omnibus Company. Their drivers used to shoot ahead of the sedate red Generals at a tremendous rate and scoop up all the customers, so that, when the Generals arrived, which had to observe a time schedule, the passengers were already half way home. The pirates had no ticket inspectors to speak of, and often their conductors used to let schoolchildren ride free.

But these early back street encounters were as nothing compared with the risks one ran when one was older and was required to wear the ludicrous uniform decreed at St Paul's – black jacket, striped trousers, stiff white collar, black tie. In winter, boys who had attained a certain height wore bowler hats and carried rolled umbrellas.

These last two items, although they conferred a certain, barely tangible, status on those who wore them in the company of their
fellow Paulines, had the reverse effect on those wearing them all alone, for example in the Hammersmith Bridge Road.

By this time, aged fifteen or so, it did not matter whether I went to school by way of Hammersmith Broadway or the back street route wearing such an outfit. There were just as many possibilities of being elbowed, tripped or jeered at on the bridge itself (a nasty place for ‘an encounter'), or in the Hammersmith Bridge Road, by what I now recognized were no longer schoolboys but semi-grown men. I now walked to school from choice, finding it too much of a bore to queue up for a bus at Ther Boiler in what was always the rush hour when I set out.

Although the penalty for not wearing a hat, whether a bowler, a school cap or a straw hat, was quite severe (a beating usually administered by a prefect), I preferred at this age to be beaten rather than draw attention to myself by wearing any of these sorts of headgear, just as by this time I was prepared to risk punishment for talking with girls I knew from St Paul's Girls' School on their way home by bus, some of whom also removed their hats but for a different reason – because they were good-looking and did not want to look like schoolgirls.

The only good thing about this crazy outfit was the umbrella. Less lethal than a cricket bat (with which if you hit someone really hard you might easily kill him), the umbrella, used as one would use a rifle with a bayonet or as an outsize truncheon, rather like those carried by the mounted police, was an ideal weapon.

Uncivilized as my behaviour may seem today, in a more squeamish but much more dangerous age, I can only plead that I had no choice. The penalty of defeat or, even worse, capture, would have been by this time much more serious than anything I experienced at Colet Court.

As a result of this misuse, my umbrella and those of my schoolfellows who found themselves in similar situations soon became
useless for the purpose for which they were intended, either failing to open when it rained and they were needed, or else opening and falling to pieces.

These journeys from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the streets of Hammersmith altogether continued for eight years of my life (not including the period when, as a small child, I attended the Froebel kindergarten in Baron's Court). In me they engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger and despair that some nineteenth-century travellers experienced in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the Central Highlands of New Guinea. And even today and now with even more reason, I sometimes experience a chilly sensation when walking alone down a narrow south London street.

Up to now the reader may feel, and with some justification, that my travels have been of a somewhat parochial nature. By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.

This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to
The Children's Colour Book of Lands and Peoples
, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring
Children's Newspaper
, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics.
Lands and Peoples
, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.

What distinguished
Lands and Peoples
from other similar publishing ventures was that it was illustrated with colour photographs. ‘Marvellous as photography is, in one sense it has failed,' the editor wrote. ‘The colour photograph is a dream … Here it is that the bold idea of
Lands and Peoples
has succeeded beyond
all expectations. What Science has failed to do, Art has done … Some seven hundred photographs from all over the world have been coloured by artists from original sources, so that they become actual photographs with colour true to life, a remarkable anticipation of the final triumph of the camera that will show the world as it really is, in all its glow of red and green and gold.' It was no hollow claim. The colours were in fact more true to life than those produced from much of the colour film in use today.

What excitement I felt when
Lands and Peoples
came thudding through the letter-box at Three Ther Mansions, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his
Morning Post
to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.

Lands and Peoples
was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind' – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,' Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children's Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.'

I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes,
was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.

In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou'westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.

In the Land of the Cymry, which is how
Lands and Peoples
described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.

In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o'shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.

In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.

Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with
Lands
and Peoples
and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section' of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World'; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium's two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle's feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on.

Everywhere in
Lands and Peoples
there were photographs of schools and schoolchildren; ruinous-looking schools in which little Negroes were learning to add up, schools in Japan with the pupils marching round in circles dressed in military-looking uniforms, clinical-looking schools in the United States in which the children were being inspected for dental decay, children brandishing enormously long slates in Burma, memorizing the Koran in oases, going to school in wheelbarrows in China, learning to read in lonely Labrador and being bastinadoed in Persia, one of the only examples of violence in the entire work. That children had to put up with going to school in other countries besides my own I found encouraging. And here at home they didn't have the bastinado, even at Colet Court.

Each time I got through all six volumes of the
Children's Colour
Book of Lands and Peoples
I began again, in much the same way as the Scotsmen of Bonnie Scotland, sturdy independent folk, who painted the Forth Bridge, would start all over again as soon as they had applied the final brush strokes to that miracle of Scottish engineering.

The other work of travel, which I also smeared with Bovril and which for many years remained my favourite book to the exclusion of almost all others, was
Travel and Adventure in Many Lands
by Cecil Gosling, formerly His Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Bolivia. I received his book, which Methuen published in 1926, as a present from my father on my ninth birthday in 1928. It was heady stuff. Gosling had a wonderfully exciting career, principally in South America, where he had travelled extensively, usually on horseback. In the course of these journeys he had encounters with robbers, hordes of wild pigs with razor-sharp tusks, vampire bats, poisonous insects, including horrible, hairy spiders and, for me most terrifying of all, with the Paraguayan pirana fish, his description of which at one time I could quote word for word, and which if the demand was sufficiently insistent, I used to recite to my friends at school during break, one of my major social accomplishments. ‘Perhaps the most dangerous inhabitant of Paraguayan waters,' he wrote, ‘is the pirana, which I suspect of causing more loss of life to man and beast than alligators,
surubis
, or
mangarujus
, and such aquatic monsters,' whatever they were. ‘The pirana is a scaled fish, similar in shape to our European perch, only the head is of more aggressive appearance, the mouth being armed with a most formidable set of teeth, more like those of a wild animal than a fish. With these, and aided by his powerful jaws, there is literally nothing that he will not bite through. I have put a lead pencil into the mouth of one, and seen it bitten clean off, and I have also seen him bite off the edge of a keenly tempered knife. His ferocity is equally developed, and one
has to be very careful about handling these demons when caught, and when getting the hooks out of their mouths. When taken out of the water they make a barking noise …

‘A friend of mine, a police inspector, while bathing, was attacked by a shoal of them, which mutilated him in such a manner that he at once swam back to the bank to the spot where his clothes were, picked up his revolver and blew out his brains.'

Reading this passage or reciting it to an audience always used to make me feel cold inside, although I had not the slightest idea at that time what the particular mutilations might be that had caused the police inspector to blow his brains out.

But it was not only the blood-and-thunder that recommended His Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to me. There were other aspects of his life which were almost equally fascinating, not to say unbelievable, as, for example, the strange encounter he had while travelling in a Pullman car from Mendoza, a town in Bolivia, over the Andes to La Paz in Chile, sometime before 1914. Seated at the far end of the car was a gentleman of about fifty years of age who kept on staring at the author in a way which he was beginning to think rather ill-mannered, when all of a sudden the stranger got up and came towards him, raising his hat which he presumably kept on his head for the duration of the journey, and addressed him in French.

‘“Pray, excuse my addressing you,” he said, “but I feel sure that you are some relation of my old friend Gyldenstolpe!” It was Count Prozor, the Russian Minister to Brazil, who must have had a peculiar facility for seeing likenesses, for his “old friend” was my uncle who had been dead for about twenty years.'

It was such anecdotes, recording the pleasures as well as the horrors of travel, that drew me to Cecil Gosling and that make me, to this day, one of his most loyal and enduring readers.