Growing Pains (14 page)

Under Mrs. Denny’s guidance I saw a lot of London. She always carted a little red
Baedeker
under her arm with the “sight” we were “doing” marked by a slip of paper. We stood before the sight and read
Baedeker
and tried to memorize the date. The wretched part of these excursions was Ed’s meeting us for tea. When we came out of the tea shops Loo and her Mother always took a quick, wrong turn on purpose, and left me alone with him for the rest of the time.

I would say, “Oh dear!” in dismay and start hunting them but Ed only laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Mother knows her way
about London as well as the nose on her face. They will be waiting at home.” But it provoked me.

English women were horrid about this marrying business. They seemed to think the aim of every girl was to find a husband. Girl students “adored” their stuck-up, autocratic art masters, or their clergy or their employers. Men and women students did not work together in the Westminster Art School. I was glad. English husband-seeking girls shamed me.

Miss Green’s PG’s were all women—all silly. Shortly after I came to Miss Green’s two men came up to London to see me. One was an Englishman from Liverpool whom I had met out in Canada. The other was the ship’s doctor, an Irishman. The Englishman was a brother of Frank Piddington whom I had so detested as a child at home. Clifton had visited Frank in Canada. He did not ask me to marry him there, but came home to think it over and wasted a postage stamp on it. I could not have been more emphatic in saying, “No,” but, as soon as he found I was in London, he came from his home in Liverpool to see how I looked in English setting. He sat very uncomfortably on the edge of a chair in Miss Green’s drawing room. The PG’s were all in a twitter.

When Clifton had got as red as he could get, he said, “Shall we go out and see some sights?”

Anything was better than that horrible drawing room, so I said, “That would be nice…what shall we see?”

“I have always had a hanker to see Madame Tussaud’s wax works,” said Clifton.

Off we went. We punched the real policeman, asked the wax policeman the way, tried to buy a catalogue from the wax dummy, watched the chest of the Sleeping Beauty hoist and flop. Then we came to the head of a dark little stair and a man asked us for an
extra sixpence. Over the drop into a cellar was the notice, “Chamber of Horrors. Expectant mothers and nervous persons warned.”

“Need we, Clifton?”

“Of course.”

Sinking into that dim underworld was horrid. Red glistened and dripped from a severed head in the guillotine, King Somebody was lying in a bath of red ink, having cut his veins in suicide, Indians were scalping, murderers murdering, villains being villainous. Once outside again, even the dirty London air seemed pure.

“What next, Clifton?”

“Well, I thought—Euston Station?”

“Must you be going so soon?” I said politely.

“Not for several hours yet…want to see the engines—very newest models, you know.”

I said, “Oh!”

Clifton was an engineer; engines were meat and drink to him. He ran from platform to platform patting the snorting brutes as they slithered panting into their places, calling them “beauties,” explaining their internals to me.

“You sit here. There is the four-thirty special. I must see her—the very, very newest.”

I sat down on a luggage truck while he ran and dodged and ducked. Then I saw him engage the engineer in conversation. They investigated every bolt and screw of the miserable thing. He came back exhilarated. “Going to let me ride home in the cab with him! Starts in an hour, time for tea first.”

We went to an A.B.C. and ate crumpets.

“Goodbye!” His hand was clammy with excitement, he gasped, “Very latest model!”

He grabbed my hand.

“It’s been splendid!…the Chamber of Horrors, the engines—you.”

I was relieved. It was so delightfully plain that this was to be our final meeting.

THE IRISH DOCTOR’S
ship was in port. The doctor came to London and to the Art School.

“Impatient young man downstairs in the Museum waiting to see our young Canadian.” Mr. Ford smiled at me and gave my arm an affectionate little pat. “Young man unable to wait till the janitor was free. Ordered my old bones to run upstairs and fetch you at once.”

He rubbed a rheumatic knee. Dear old man! Descending the stair we saw that the janitor’s amble was unusually brisk. He came lashing his feather duster and glowering down the aisle between the architectural tombs. There sat the little Irish ship’s doctor on the stomach of a “Great One,” impatiently kicking his heels against its stone sofa.

“Oh, doctor, their stomachs are sacred, please don’t!”

He jumped down.

“SHALL WE GO INTO
St. James’s Park and sit on a bench? It is quite close.”

It was a wide bench. The doctor sat down on one end and I on the other. Soon he was so close to my end of the bench that I fell o?. I walked round the bench and sat down on its other end,—he did not look nearly so nice or nearly so well-bred in plain clothes. He was ill-at-ease too, trying to make conversation.

I said, “Don’t they squabble?” meaning the sparrows who, down in the dust, were having a battle over a crust. A dove swooped down and took the crust.

“Gentlest of all birds!—a dove—” sighed the doctor. He was slithering up the bench again.

“Doves squabble like the dickens,” I replied.

The doctor said, “Your tongue is losing its Canadian twist; you have changed in these few months.”

“I should hope so! Wasn’t I flabby and ghastly? Let’s walk.”

I jumped up just as his hand touched my arm. We strode silent three times round the duckpond.

“What time is it?”—Being late for dinner is one of the unpardonable sins in England.

“Goodbye.”

I held out my hand. He hurried south, I north, neither looked back. Was it his uniform, not he, that had been a little attractive? Perhaps doctors, too, prefer girls meek and sick.

But for that hint, I was grateful to the doctor. I was trying to speak more like the English, ashamed a little of what they ridiculed as my colonialisms. Bless you, doctor, for the warning! Unconsciously I’d tried to be less different from the other students,—I who had seen many Canadian-born girls go to England to be educated and come back more English than the English. I had despised them for it. I was grateful for the doctor’s visit and I swore to myself I would go home to Canada as Canadian as I left her.

ACROSS FROM THE
dim archway of the Architectural Museum was a tiny grocer shop owned and run by Widow Simpson, a woman mild-voiced and spare. The little shop was darkly over-shadowed in the narrow street by the Architectural Museum. Pinched in between the grey of the street and the black of the interior, goods mounted to the top of the shop’s misty window, pyramids of boxes and cans which Mrs. Simpson sold across a brown counter under a flickering gas jet, sold to ragged children and draggled women who flung their money upon the counter with a coppery clank. Mrs. Simpson’s trade was “penny.” She handed goods to children unwrapped but for the “lydies” she wrapped in old newspapers. At the back of the little shop was a door with a pane of glass inset. This door led into Mrs. Simpson’s “Tea-room for Students.” Here students, who wanted an entire light meal or to supplement their carried lunches, hurried at noon across Tufton Street, hatless, hungry and in paint-spotted pinafores.

The small Tea-room was centred by a round table on which stood a loaf, potted meat, jam, apples, biscuits, cheese and butter cut into ha’penny portions. In the middle of the table stood a handleless delft cup. Business was run on the honour system.
You ate a penny’s worth, hurled a penny into the delft cup, ate another pennyworth and hurled in another penny. Anyone mean enough to cheat Mrs. Simpson was very low.

Mrs. Simpson trusted us about the food but not with her “cats and her kettles.” On either side of the bars of the grate fire were black hobs and on them sat copper kettles. On the floor before the fire was a spread of cats, black, tortoise-shell and tabby, so close packed that they resembled an immense, heaving fur rug. No footgear but Mrs. Simpson’s old felts could judge its placing among tails and paws. So Mrs. Simpson herself filled the great brown teapot over and over from the kettles. No one else was allowed to for fear they might scald a cat. When a kettle was empty Mrs. Simpson picked her way among students and cats to a tiny door in the corner and climbed two steps. On the first step she “shoo’d,” on the second she “hist” and was answered by a concerted meowing. In her bedroom Mrs. Simpson kept special cats, along with the great jugs of fresh water drawn from some public tap in the district. The jugs were ready to refill the tea kettles and the cats to dart to alley freedom.

The Tea-room boasted two chairs and a stool. Mrs. Simpson usually lunched some dozen or more students. The first three got the chairs and stool, the next six sat on the floor, the remainder squirmed a foothold among the sitters and stood. It took planning to reach the food and to make sure it found its way into your mouth before somebody’s elbow jogged and upset it.

The Tea-room window was never open. It looked into a small yard, piled with “empties.” This place was the cats’ opera-house and sports-field. It was very grimy, a vista of dim congestion, that filtered to us through a lace curtain, grey with the grime of London.

Mrs. Simpson’s was a cosy, affectionate institution, very close to the Art School’s heart. From Mr. Ford down to the last student every one spoke gently of the little, busy woman, faded, work-worn cockney. There was a pink ridge prominent above her eye-hollows. It was bare of eyebrows. Above the ridge was a sad-lined forehead. The general drag of her features edged towards a hard little walnut of grizzled hair, nobbed at the rounding of her skull.

Even in that slum setting there was something strong, good and kindly about Mrs. Simpson that earned our respect, our love. The men-students helped her “stock-take” and shamble through some crude form of bookkeeping. When the chattering, paint-daubed mob of us pressed through the shop into the little back-room Mrs. Simpson’s smile embraced us—her young ladies and gentlemen—as sober and as enduring as the Abbey’s shadow. We were the last shred of respectability before Westminster slummed. The Abbey had flung us over the Dean’s Yard wall into Tufton Street. Too poor for the Abbey, too respectable for the slum, the Architectural Museum and the art students hovered between dignity and muddle.

THE MAKE-BELIEVE
gentility of Miss Green’s Paying-Guest-House became intolerable to me. An injury received to my foot out in Canada was causing me great pain. Transportation from Miss Green’s to the Westminster School was difficult and indirect. I made this my excuse to change my living quarters. Miss Green was terribly offended at my leaving her house. She made scenes and shed tears.

I took a room in a house in Vincent Square where two other Art School students lodged. One of these girls, Alice Watkin, was the girl in the school I liked above any other. The other student was the disagreeable head of the Life room. We three shared an evening meal in their sitting-room. The disagreeable student made it very plain that I was in no way entitled to use the sitting-room, except to eat the miserable dinner with them, sharing its cost. The room was dismal. It was furnished with a table, three plain kitchen chairs of wood, a coal-scuttle and a sugar basin. The sugar basin was kept on the mantelpiece. It was the property of “Wattie” and me who kept it full to help to work our puddings down. Because the disagreeable student was on diet and did the
catering our meals were sugarless and hideous. Our grate fire always sulked. Old Disagreeable would often pour some of
our
sugar on the black coals to force a blaze.

Vincent Square was grimly respectable though it bordered on the Westminster slums. The Square lay just behind Greater Victoria Street. You could reach the Architectural Museum in an entirely respectable way by cutting through a little street into “Greater Victoria” which was wide, important and mostly offices. When you came to the Abbey you doubled back through Dean’s Yard into Tufton Street and so to the Architectural Museum but this way was circuitous. The others always took it, but I cut through the slums because every saved foot-step spared me pain. The slum was horrible—narrow streets cluttered with barrows, heaped with discards from high-class districts, fruit having decay-spots, wilted greens, cast-o? clothing. Women brushed their hair in the street beside their barrows while waiting for trade. Withered, unwashed babies slept among shrivelled apples on the barrows.

I tried not to see too much slum while passing through. It revolted my spirit. Wattie said, “Don’t go that way, Carlight”—that was always her name for me. When I came to the School motor-cars were just coming into use; they were fractious, noisy, smelly things. It was not a compliment to be called “Motor.” Wattie had invented her own name for me. She never called me “Motor” like the others, always “Carlight”!

“Carlight,” Wattie pleaded, “don’t go through the slum! How can you!”

“Oh, Wattie, my foot hurts so!”

I continued to limp through the murk, odours, grime, depravity; revolting ooze, eddying in waves of disgustingness, propelled by
the brooms of dreadful creatures into the gutters, to be scooped into waiting Corporation waggons dripping in the street.

One raw, foggy morning, as I hobbled along, a half-drunk street-sweeper brought his broom whack across my knees. They bent the wrong way, my bad foot agonized! Street filth poured down my skirt.

“ ’Ere you! Obstructin’ a gent’s hoccipation.”

“Yer mucked the swell good, ’Enery,” chuckled a woman.

“Let ’er look out, what ’er ’ere for, any’ow? Me, I’m a doin’ of me dooty.”

I boiled but dared not speak, dared not look at the creature. I could have fought. I think I could have killed just then. Doubling over, the nearest I could to a run, I managed to get to the school cloak-room.