Portrait of Elmbury

JOHN MOORE

Confession

Part One

Through the Window

Part Two

Background to Boyhood

Part Three

Going, Going

Part Four

The Uneasy Peace

Part Five

The Chimes at Midnight

Part Six

Indian Summer

“Elmbury” is a real place in the sense that I have taken as it were the ground-plan of a real town and built somewhat freely upon it. Likewise this account of the fortunes of its people in the years between the wars is built upon a framework of truth; but I haven't hesitated to alter names, to play tricks with time and geography, and where necessary to import one or two original and purely imaginary wrongdoers in cases where a selection from among our ready-made “Elmbury” ones might have resulted in an action for libel.

Background to Childhood—Punch and Judy Show—Beauty in Ugliness—“Fields Flocks Flowers”—A Vision of Piers Plowman—Missed Opportunities—Odd-job Man's Delight— English Eccentrics—The Bourgeois at Play—The Bourgeois at Work—Gallery of Relations—The Colonel—Faces at the Window —Hopscotch, Hoops, Hobbly-'onkers—Pistol, Bardolph and Nym— The Town Scoundrels—Oyez! Oyez!—Passing Acquaintances— The Mystery of Fred—Christmas Fair—Elmbury Goes to War

The loveliest house in Elmbury, which was called Tudor House, looked out across a wide main street upon the filthiest slum I have ever set eyes on in England. Few people saw anything incongruous in this, for in those days Elmbury was a higgledy-piggledy place, of incomparable beauty and incomparable squalor, and its inhabitants had retained something of the spirit of the Elizabethans, who could enjoy
Hamlet
in the interval between an afternoon at the bear-pit and a visit to the brothel, when both bear-pit and brothel lay within a stone's throw of the theatre.

In Tudor House I spent most of my early childhood. That is literally true, for apart from brief formal “walks” with Old Nanny we didn't go out much, and since I was erroneously supposed to be “not very strong” I was always in the condition of having a cold, of having had a cold, or of being liable to catch a cold if I got wet. So Tudor House was my world; and with its winding staircases, its dark oak-panelled corridors, its numerous exciting junk-rooms and attics, and its curious and
delightful back-garden, it provided a domain wide enough for any small boy.

The garden, especially, was a child's paradise. It was not too big, so that we knew every stick and stone of it; and since it was by no means a source of pride either to our parents or to the occasional odd-jobbing gardener, we could do whatever we liked in it without reproof. Moreover, it had an unique and thrilling smell, a sort of jungle-smell made up, I suppose, of damp rotting leaves, wet sandstone walls, a stagnant well, and dead cats in the nearby river: you would scarcely term it a fragrance, but we loved it, somehow we associated it with adventure and mysterious things.

No doubt the extraordinarily high walls were the cause of the garden being so damp. One of these was provided by a Drill Hall wherein the local Volunteers ineffectually paraded once a week; another, of tremendous size, unscalable even by cats, was a bastion against our next-door neighbours: it need have been no bigger if the Picts and the Scots had been encamped on the other side of it. The third wall, most unnecessarily, shut out the slow river, with its barges, its rowing-boats, and its immobile patient fishermen. A great oaken door, however, which creaked terrifyingly like that which gives entrance to the home of the omnipotent gods, opened on reluctant hinges to these delights.

The high walls, which seemed to cloister the garden rather than to imprison it, were in themselves extremely beautiful. One of them was made of Old Red Sandstone, and the other two of that pinkish-orange Georgian brick which becomes almost incandescent and glows with an inward light when the sun shines on it. The Drill Hall was covered with Virginia Creeper, its leaves redder than robins' breasts in autumn. The wall-against-the-neighbours was hung with ivy, a dusty hiding-place for sparrows' nests, for small yellow moths, and for those big downy brown ones called Old Ladies. The river wall, of weathered sandstone, was a background to the most delightful herbaceous border imaginable, a small-scale jungle in which peonies, stocks, marigolds and red-hot pokers fought for life, and out of which triumphantly rose great hollyhocks and even more gigantic sunflowers, a few of which each season topped the wall and, having looked
towards the Promised Land, bowed their heads towards it and contentedly died.

For the rest, the garden possessed one climbable tree, a laburnum, seasonally weeping golden rain; a bush of white lilac; a sort of shrubbery about five yards square, just big enough for one thrush's nest each spring; white jasmine on an outhouse wall; a small wicket-scarred lawn; a “sand-pit” in which we children were supposed to play (but we had better games); and a disused well, with an old ramshackle wooden cover to it, which we believed to be the entrance to a monks' secret passage.

Above the garden towered the big house. Its “backs” were as beautiful as its façade. You went up some wide, semi-circular stone steps on to a flagged courtyard around which stood the half-timbered building, whitewashed between its sepia oak beams. The back-door was a tremendous piece of oak, studded with nails, with a knocker heavy enough to wake the dead; there were strange scars on the oak as if someone with an axe had tried to force his way in. Inside there was a sudden cool darkness of stone-floored corridors, sculleries, pantries and whatnot, and then the spice-scented kitchen with Old Cookie, if she were sober, busy over her pots and pans. Then you came to the hall, its panelled walls hung with brass ladles, a curious form of decoration (but pictures would have looked cold and lonely against the dark oak); then, off the hall, the drawing-room, very long and light, with big windows and a pale oak parquet floor—the walls abounding in more brass ladles, in copper warming-pans, shelves of pewter tankards, cabinets of valuable china, a housemaid's nightmare; and then the dining-room, as cosily dark as the drawing-room was airily-bright, with the royal coat-of-arms (we never knew why) carved above the mantelpiece.

There was also a fair-sized room with white enamelled walls, called “the day nursery,” which had a comfortable window-seat beneath its leaded windows, looking out on to the main street. This was the place where my sister and I were most often to be found, with our noses pressed close to the diamond-shaped panes, gazing out with lively interest and eager anticipation at the black
and gaping maw of Double Alley, which was the name of the slum opposite us. Some of the panes had queer distorting whorls in them, so that from certain angles Double Alley was double indeed; and others were cloudy with a mysterious pinkish cloudiness, imparting to objects seen through them an unearthly flush. Tinted thus, the entrance to the alley, with the usual quarrelsome and gesticulating figures standing about it, was not unlike the yawning jaws of a medieval hell.

Indeed, even among Elmbury's slums, Double Alley was something to be wondered at. Respectable women drew their skirts closer about them as they passed its nauseous opening; even the doctor and the priest were unwilling adventurers on the rare occasions when they were summoned to visit it; and policemen, who were more frequent visitors, took care to go in pairs when their duties took them there.

One of the most extraordinary things about Double Alley was that little children who lived within it would run about naked, in the full light of day. This served to sharpen the impression which the place gave to strangers, that it was populated by fiends.

We children had no such illusion. We knew very well that the inhabitants of Double Alley were flesh-and-blood. (The blood, indeed, was only too evident on Saturday nights.) Their too-human frailties were daily manifested to us. We knew the names, the relationships, and a large part of the life-histories of almost all that piteous riff-raff. The ragged women, the drunken men, the screaming wanton wenches, the rickety children, were more real to us than many of our relations; far more real than the visitors in evening clothes who came to dine with our parents and afterwards played the piano, and sang, in the drawing-room. We never had much use for such singing; but when Nobbler Price came home from the pub roaring and bellowing we thoroughly appreciated the entertainment. It was very much better than
When Lady Betty Walks Abroad
or
Melisande
.

A fair example of Double Alley's inhabitants would be Mr. and Mrs. Hook. The domestic disagreements of this hot-tempered couple always took place
coram populo
, at the street entrance to the Alley, instead of in the decent seclusion of their own hovel; not through any exhibitionism, I suppose, but simply because, for fighting on the scale practised by them, their hovel was not big enough. We had learned, from nurse-maid's or servant's gossip, enough of Mr. and Mrs. Hook's affairs to be able to reconstruct the course of their quarrels, which much resembled that of a Punch and Judy show. Mr. Hook would return, lurching and staggering, from his festivities, and Mrs. Hook, hearing his approach or being warned of it, would rush out to greet him with blows and blasphemy; and in a confused flurry of attack and counter-attack they would disappear together into the alley's dark maw. There followed an interval during which it might be supposed Mr. Hook slept, while his wife providently abstracted what remained of his week's pay from his pockets. Then Mr. Hook would wake up, remember an important appointment at the George, and discover that he was penniless. His enormous bellow of rage was the signal for Mrs. Hook to run helter-skelter down the alley to take up station in their traditional battleground at its entrance. There among the chattering anticipatory neighbours she would await, with arms akimbo, the terrible coming of her outraged lord. Again it was just like Punch and Judy.
Whang!
—Mrs. Hook clouted him on the side of the head.
Bonk!
—Mr. Hook countered with a left to the jaw. And so it went on, until some spoil-sport fetched a policeman. (Punch and Judy again, you see; these disputants invariably observed the formality and the tradition.) But to the two peaky-faced children who watched with their noses glued to the window it was better than any Punch and Judy show: it was the first taste of real life.

There were others, more colourful if less violent than the Hooks, who took part in this daily pageant which might almost have been staged for our special benefit. (At least we had seats in the front row of the stalls.) There was, for instance, Black Sal. She was mad, she was frequently drunk, and she never
washed. When the frenzy was upon her, or when she was full of gin, she would range about the town chanting meaningless obscenities; at other times she practised a kind of coarse and friendly banter, a running commentary upon life and affairs, addressed to all and sundry, but particularly to the mayor, as she waddled down the middle of the street. These comments were generally expressed in rough and ready rhymes, or in the assonances which modern poets use, which gave them added point. “Wot's the Town Council but a lot of scoundrels?” she would ask; and there were few found willing to answer her. “The Mayor has banquets, we ain't got no blankets,” she would declare. All the time she threw quips and jeers over her shoulder as the respectable top-floor windows were opened and the respectable householders peered out. “Ho! ho! ho!” she would cry. “Ships yuds is chip this morning!” Sheep's heads were symbols of stupidity: thus she reproved the inquisitive who so rudely stared at her. She would sing, too, improvising as she went along: