Noble in Reason (29 page)

“Oh, Mr. Chris, are you looking for Mr. Jarmayne? He's here!” she cried.

Sure enough my father sat very comfortably by the fire in the front room, with an empty cup beside him.

“He couldn't remember who lived in this house and came in to ask, so I persuaded him to have a cup of coffee.”

“It was very kind of you,” said I stiffly. “It's a pity you didn't tell us where you were going, father—half the town's
out looking for you and I was just about to inform the police.”

My father snorted.

“We mustn't take up any more of your time,” said I to our hostess, speaking politely with an effort—the thought of John's comments on the affair vexed me. “Come along, father.”

“Don't scold him, Mr. Chris,” said the young wife. “We're always very glad to have him here, you know. Would you like to take him out the back way, so he won't have the path to climb?”

I accepted this courtesy and we moved slowly out of the house, my father hanging on my arm as usual. As soon as we were out of earshot he turned on me hotly.

“You've no need to look so glum, Chris—I'm not a child and I won't be treated like one. I shall go where I please.”

“How do you expect me to look, father, when you've worried us all into fits and ruined my morning's work?” I countered. All the same, I thought, trying to practise my habit of translation: as a child how I hated not being able to go out without his permission! He must hate having to demand mine. On a sudden impulse I went on: “I'm your son, you know; I can't be a saint any more than you can.”

My father opened his blue eyes wide and gazed at me in astonishment. After a moment, however, this expression became mingled with a kind of glee. He said no more, did not loiter on the way home, received Mrs. Womersley's expostulations with dignity, and altogether behaved very meekly for the rest of the day. And in the evening, as we sat together, he began suddenly to pour out to me the story of his original quarrel with his own father, which I have recounted in an earlier chapter.

“He was a fiery, vehement sort of a man,” he said. “And I expect I was the same, you see. Like you said this morning, Chris.”

“I expect you were, father,” said I sardonically.

My father laughed.

“I was fond of him all the same,” he said. “I was jealous of his affection for his second family of children, you know— Alfred and that lot. And I expect I said things I shouldn't. Yes, I expect I did.”

“What did you say, father?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, I said they were spoiled and extravagant,” admitted my father. “And so they were, Chris! So they were. There was a watch-chain your uncle Alfred had—a pound a link, it cost. ...”

This was the first of a long series of reminiscences by my father, in the swirling course of which
dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean
(to quote Hardy) sometimes raised their heads and were swept away down the current of time. My mother—her great beauty, her wild, reckless, drinking family, my father's passion for her and sin with her—thus emerged; “for after all you're a man now, Chris, you understand these things.” The tragedy of poor Henrietta, plain, anaemic, doomed to an early death, came out too: “If I'd married
her,
now! But somehow I never could abide the thought of her in that way. I thought at one time you were going to be like Henrietta, you know, Chris. You had a look of her, as a child. But when you're angry you've got a look of your mother too.” Stories of financial ruin and triumph, awful records of family hatreds and unnatural loves, swindles in family businesses, tricks about family wills, musical intrigues and disappointments when my father and Mr. Hodgson sang duets together, absurd but powerful sentimentalities—“This house was always just a bit more than I could afford, Chris, but I liked its name, you see, it reminded me of my real home in Ashworth”—all these flowed out, mingled with fascinating details of the manners and customs of the nineteenth century, that period which now seemed so fabulously prosperous to the depressed textile trade. My chance remark about our biological
similarity of disposition—though it was not really chance, but the fruit of my whole intellectual and moral struggle—had convinced my father that there was sympathy between us, and accordingly he poured out to me his whole experience: more than seventy years of West Riding life.

Perhaps in other circumstances these tales would not have made so deep an impression. Even as it was, sometimes these sessions of recollection were tedious. My father, who rose late, liked to sit up late and sometimes, when his anecdotes were trivial or repetitive, his droning talk seemed quite interminable; I longed to escape for a drink, a quiet read, a lonely walk; only affection or duty (I was never quite sure which and perhaps in this case they were the same thing) kept me there listening to him. But usually I listened enthralled and even amidst the tedium found items of significance, for at that time everything about the West Riding enthralled me, because the West Riding was in agony and I grieved for its agony with all my heart.

The history of the West Riding during the post-war slump has often been related, both by pens abler than mine and by my own. I will record here only those details of the long-drawn-out ordeal which struck most strongly and painfully on my feelings and thus influenced me most.

On the workers' side there was the protracted, seemingly endless, agony of unemployment; the long, long queues at the employment exchanges revealed the dreadful fact that one-third of the whole adult population of Hudley was then drawing unemployment insurance pay—or, as the harsh phrase of the day had it, was “on the dole.” There was the hated humiliation of the means test, which provided that if one member of a family at long last secured a job, the unemployment benefit of the father at once went down, so that the circumstances of the family were not in the least improved. Men rotted at the street corners, physically from lack of
sufficient food, mentally as skill decayed and hope perished.

But on the managerial side too my sympathies were deeply engaged. There were bankruptcies, there were suicides, there were nervous breakdowns, there were collapses like my father's, among those of middle age; there were breakings of young lives, lads and girls recalled from universities or training on which they had set their heart, marriages postponed. Worse than all these, perhaps, were the nerve-racking struggles to avoid these disasters, which preceded them. Independent, stiff-necked, stubborn West Riding folk—like my uncle Alfred, for instance—had to bow their heads and ask help from relatives: the greatest humiliation which can befall any northerner. Manufacturers went to interviews with their bank managers as if entering a torture chamber; it became a grimly familiar joke to praise these interviews for keeping the weight down—their agony was so intense that the victim sweated heavily. Now for the first time in my life I heard Yorkshire people speaking openly, not of their “brass”—they had done that, a good deal too often in some people's view, before—but of their lack of it; financial stringency which would previously have been concealed by every possible means, was now sardonically joked about wherever the middle class met.

Indeed during this period the whole industrial north— wage-earner, millowner, and all their dependants—lived in a state of continual uncertainty, anxiety and nervous tension. It was not to be wondered at that under such conditions the young people snatched feverishly at every possible enjoyment in order to relieve the strain by forgetting for a moment the threat under which they lived; let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow father is going bankrupt or losing his job, became the universal motto. Anne, John's youngest girl, said cheerfully to me one day: “I'm ready to give up everything but pleasure.” This remark, utterly incomprehensible to a Victorian like my father (who puzzled over it for weeks),
was greeted with a chorus of laughing agreement by her contemporaries.

These sufferings, observed day by day and fused night by night with my father's recollections, aroused in me a passionate sympathy for the West Riding in its trouble, a passionate desire to explain it to itself, to make it aware of its own best and worst qualities, to implore it to take a reasonable course.

Driving to Lonsdale Road one morning to lay an urgent problem about Mrs. Womersley's holiday before Edie, I saw a crowd of men, textile operatives I thought probably, demonstrating in front of the house next to John's, where lived the head of the Hudley Labour Exchange. The men stood bunched on the path, carefully not treading on the grass or the autumn flowers, and talking amongst themselves, while one of the party kept his finger pressed on the door bell. There was no reply and the talking rose to angry shouts, in which insulting epithets about the manager were freely hurled. I walked up John's path feeling deeply troubled, eager to help but conscious of my own futility as a mere bystander. I rang, there was a pause, then Edie admitted me very quickly, pulling me round the half-opened door with a conspiratorial air. Without a word she led the way to the kitchen, where the Labour Exchange manager's wife sat with tears in her eyes, trying to drink the cup of tea which Edie had made for her. (I have seen this before, I thought, remembering my father's disappearance into Ashleigh and its result, and I felt oddly aware that this too might be a crucial incident in my life.) The manager of the Labour Exchange was in fact away attending a regional conference, but the deputation of workers, on demanding to see him at the Exchange and being merely told that he was absent, had surged out to his private address.

“As if he wouldn't alter the benefit rate if he could!” exclaimed his wife, with trembling lip.

It seemed to me that their inability to obtain an answer
to their ring was irritating the deputation, and that for their sake as well as hers some explanation should be given.

“I'll go into your house by the back way and open the front door and talk to them,” I suggested.

“Nay!” said the wife, rising to her feet: “I'll talk to them myself. We've done nothing wrong and I'm not afraid of them.”

Brushing aside our expostulations, she went out by the front door, entered her garden and walked steadily through the knot of men, saying in a disagreeable tone:

“Perhaps you'll allow me to enter my own house, will you? My husband's in Leeds and you'll get nothing here however long you stay.”

Their resentment intensified, the men angrily slouched off.

This scene, with its unnecessary suffering, its waste of admirable feeling, on both sides—the woman's courage and her discourtesy, the men's discourtesy and their scrupulous care not to damage the garden, the ignorance of both in the face of world conditions—this scene seemed to crystallize all that I wanted to say, not only for the West Riding, or even for all industry, but for all humanity; it seemed to me to provide a clear pattern of all human misunderstanding. I went home and wrote it down at once; and thus began the trilogy of novels which I myself, and I think my readers too, regard as my real work:
Millstone Grit, Choose How
and
Hudley Pride.
These very Yorkshire titles—for millstone grit is the name of the extremely hard rough stone of which the West Riding Pennines are composed, and
choose how
is a thoroughly Yorkshire phrase expressing laconic determination—reveal the extent of my concern, no longer for myself, but for my neighbours, my fellow men.

Prince Azgid's home lion, when at last boldly faced, proved to be a tame beast kept for the purpose; a domestic pet, it
leaped playfully over his head and then ran back and began to lick his hands. Neither my father nor the West Riding could ever be called tame or given to hand-licking; yet my problem concerning them was solved on rather similar though perhaps even more ironic lines.

Facing his lion boldly gave Azgid power in his realm; it was the same with mine. But my lion was ailing, and my duty was, ironically enough, to try to keep it in good health. My father and the West Riding were both struggling for their lives, and all my attention was turned, not to defend myself against, but to encourage, support and preserve them; meanwhile, they proved to be my true friends, who nourished my work from their own store.

The West Riding now began to rise slowly out of its great depression. Messrs. E. E. Jarmayne & Sons had survived the ordeal and presently flourished, and the strain on John relaxed. On myself, however, the strain increased. Financially I had all I required. My loan to Hilbert was repaid with interest. I was able to send Robert away to the minor public school of his choice—where I wrote him weekly letters as unlike my father's hectoring epistles to Henry and myself as I could manage; I was able to buy a new car, to refurbish Ashroyd, to cushion in every useful way my father's invalid existence. But during the last few years my father had become so completely dependent on me for comfort, interest and general reassurance that it was utterly impossible for me to leave him; I must tread at his side every step of the painful path downhill.

To keep him amused was the great problem. He slept much, but there were many long hours to be filled each day.

“It's a pity he can't knit,” said Anne once, looking at him thoughtfully. “Shall I try to teach him, Uncle Chris?”

With an amused vision of the offended dignity with which my father would receive such a proposition I exclaimed hastily: “Good heavens, no!”

At first I used to find him jobs to do to “help” me; he was proud and excited when asked to cut the leaves of review books or sort out recently typed articles. But these occupations had presently to be abandoned because his hands were too weak to cut the pages cleanly and he grew confused in mind over the difference between top sheets and carbon copies. And it was so with all his occupations. At one time, for example, he took to reading a great number of books. These were difficult to choose, for he was bored by novels of the namby-pamby kind, could not read biographies except very light ones, and grew over-excited about books of travel. Novels of the modern school, with their frank presentation of the facts of life, horrified him—or at least he said so.