Portrait of Elmbury (4 page)

My relations on my father's side were much more stolid; they would never, I think, have sat down to a dish of roast hedgehog at a Romany camp fire. They had lived in and about Elmbury for so long, and moreover there were so many of them, that they seemed to have proprietary rights in the place. They were Mayors, Justices of the Peace, Churchwardens. Most of them were comfortably off, none of them was rich. Most of them were able, few of them were clever. In fact, they mistrusted cleverness. That was the sort of people they were. Cleverness, they thought, generally got you into trouble; and it was true enough that the only one of them who was really clever finished up by drinking himself to death. His name was Clem; and he was brilliant. He became a Barrister, which was outside the family tradition, and upon the threshold of a great career he paused, hesitated, and turned back. He liked the local pub better. But when we children asked what had happened to him, and why Clem who was so gay and handsome did not come to visit us any more, there was always an uncomfortable pause. The family didn't like talking about Clem. “He was very
clever, of course, but cleverness isn't everything.” We had to be content with that.

The others, lacking this terrible handicap of cleverness, prospered moderately and lived long respectable lives. They were all large and substantial, rather like family portraits come to life; Uncle Reg the doctor; Uncle Jim the lawyer; Uncle Tom and my father, the auctioneers. They sat together upon the Town Council; they took it in turns to be Mayor, and Chairman of the local Conservative Association; they administered charities and trusts with meticulous care; they shared a monopoly of the post of churchwarden of the Abbey. The editor of the local paper had little trouble when they died; the same obituary notice, with a few trifling alterations would serve for all of them. “He played a prominent part in Public Life.” And that indeed was their tradition; so long as the Public was not too large. Elmbury with its five thousand inhabitants was just big enough; if you ventured into the world beyond, you got mixed up in wider politics, which were administered by clever fellows; and clever fellows were generally shady fellows, and by no means to be trusted.

Beyond all these uncles and their wives, like the widening ripples round a splash in a pond extended a vast complication of distant and yet more distant relations: a network, an inescapable spider's web of kith and kin. Most of them had enormous families; and this resulted in countless cousins.

You might say that this regiment, this veritable Army Corps, was based upon Elmbury. Many of its members lived there; the others, who travelled farther afield, returned there from time to time to go into winter quarters; and unless the accident of death overtook them suddenly, they all came back there to die. I cannot write about Elmbury unless I mention them too; for they grew about the place as the ivy wraps itself round a tree.

Since even the wandering ones would ultimately return, there
was a family tradition that relations must be “kept up with.” Keeping up with relations was a stern duty; you failed in that duty if you let them fall into desuetude, if they “got out of touch.” In order to prevent this, you had to write them letters at Christmas and send them diaries on their birthdays; and whenever it occurred to my mother that Aunt Nancy or Cousin Gerald was being neglected, was falling into disuse, she immediately invited the forgotten one to Tudor House in order that the dusty and rusty relationship might be polished up and oiled and put into running order again.

If they could not come to you, it was your duty to go to them. Great-aunt Mary-Jane was bedridden, and wore a nightcap, and looked just like the wolf which frightened Red Riding Hood. We were frequently taken to visit her, in the dark Victorian house at the top of Elmbury High Street, and she gave us curious presents, such as stamps pierced through with a darning needle and strung tightly on a piece of thread, so that they formed a kind of snake, wriggly and tenuous. Alas, the snake was composed of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues; and the five hundred stamps which articulated it would be worth, to-day, about two hundred pounds if Great-aunt Mary-Jane hadn't in every case poked her red-hot darning-needle through the young queen's head.

Other relations, more mobile, came to visit us; a succession of aunts and uncles, of first and second and third cousins, of cousins goodness knows how many times removed. It took about a year for the wheel to turn full-circle; and then, like the second house at the pictures, it began all over again, but one had forgotten the characters which appeared at the beginning; so that the procession of relatives seemed endless indeed.

They did not, however, unduly oppress us. The house was big, and they troubled us children very little, intruding into our privacy only now and then, when my mother no doubt said to them: “But of course you'd like to see the children …” and they, liking nothing less, warmly agreed. So Old Nanny, warned in advance, spat on a handkerchief to rub imaginary smuts off our faces; and we were made ready in the nursery, hair brushed, toys tidied away, ready for the awful visitation—of rich Aunt
Blanche or poor Cousin Minnie or fashionable Aunt Doll or soldierly Cousin Farley who was in the Guards, or decrepit old Cousin Tom Holland who'd fought in the Indian Mutiny. … We shook hands, and they made the usual idiotic remarks, and soon they were gone, to be forgotten until another year brought them like migrants back again.

They did not tarry long in our recollections; and shortly we were back in our favourite window-seat, gazing out through the blurry glass between the leads upon the rose-pink-tinted fantastic little world, and the daily pageant that passed along the town's wide High Street.

Once a year, on Boxing Day, scarlet was the colour of pageantry when the foxhounds met outside the Swan Hotel and afterwards the whole cavalcade tittuped past on its way to the first draw, dappled flop-eared hounds, shining horses, shining leather, shining top-hats. In the summer there was sometimes a meet of the otterhounds, but this was less of an entertainment because there were no horses and no pink coats; instead the participants wore a blue uniform with scarlet stockings which even to us seemed rather odd. I remember chiefly some ferocious-looking women, thus garbed, carrying long poles with which, I imagined, they must surely beat the poor otter over the head. I remember also a man like an elderly gnome who wore a faded green Norfolk jacket and knee-breeches, with a deerstalker hat of astonishing shape to match. These clothes, and something indescribable in the air with which he wore them, marked him without doubt as a man of the forest and the field. He caught my imagination at once, as some sort of older edition of Robin Hood. His face was red and his nose was a brighter red; he had a badger-grizzled walrus moustache and little twinkling blue eyes. We were told he was “the Colonel”; we never asked what colonel, and it was years before I discovered his name. Then, as you will read, I got to know him well; and I learned from him more
than I ever learned from any schoolmaster. But I never forgot my first sight of him, when I watched the meet through the window (as usual, I had a cold). He arrived on a motor-bicycle, which he was unable to control. Skidding to avoid the hounds, he fell off. He picked himself up, grunted angrily, promptly produced a silver flask out of his pocket, and examined it carefully to make sure that it was unbroken. Then he shook it, holding it up to his ear, to make certain that its contents were undiminished. Then, to make doubly sure, he put it to his lips and swigged the lot. As he wiped his moustache he happened to look towards our window; and seeing my face there he suddenly grinned. His ribston-pippin cheeks all wrinkles, he looked like a kelpie. I was enchanted and I grinned back, but it was too late; the hounds were moving off and the Colonel with them, hobbling along on bowed legs and with bent back, as crooked as a hobgoblin.

He was not the only acquaintance we made through the day-nursery window—which was on the ground floor, so we could communicate with people who passed by. One wet winter night, when the gas-lamps made blurred yellow pools on the pavement and our breaths condensed on the window-pane, there came out of the shadows suddenly a white-faced little boy, who pressed his nose against the glass and put out his tongue at us. In a moment he was gone; but we had a notion that he was still hanging about close by, so we tapped on the window. Nothing stirred. We tapped again. Then suddenly he poked his head round the corner, pressed his face against the pane, and shouted cheekily—we could just hear him—“
Who be thee a-tabberin' at?”
Communication was established, and we began to talk, sometimes by shouting and sometimes by signs. Next day he came back, and the next, and after that every night for many months. His name was Alfie, and he told us everything we wanted to know about the lives of the Hooks and Nobbler Price and Black Sal;
it seemed to us that he had his being in a wide and immensely exciting world, and greatly we envied him. Greatly he envied us, no doubt, as he stood out in the cold and looked through the window at our toys and our bright hearth. There is still something terrible to me in the thought of the two small white faces pressed against the dividing glass, and the two pairs of eyes each looking out upon an alien and utterly desirable world.

In the spring he suddenly ceased to visit us. It may be he was taken to hospital—he looked pale and frail enough; it may be simply that he preferred bird's-nesting to our company. But for weeks our sense of loss was deep and sharp indeed; we felt like beleaguered citizens must feel, whose last link is cut with the world beyond their invested walls.

If Alfie envied our toys, it was true also that we were jealous of the rougher and less sophisticated games in which he and the rest of the Double Alley youngsters took part: marbles, tops, tipcat, hopscotch, hoops and 'obbly-'onkers. The latter, also called Conkers, belonged, of course, to the autumn, when the bright glossy horse-chestnuts littered the ground beneath the grave churchyard trees. The other games were also seasonal, though it is not easy to understand why. Tops and hopscotch belonged to the winter, hoops to the early spring, marbles to high summer, and tipcat, as far as I can remember, to summer holidays. There was a strict convention governing these matters: a boy would as soon bowl a hoop in January as a man would ride in Rotten Row in a frock coat and top hat; yet in March, when the hoop season came in, not a single ragged guttersnipe would be seen without one. They were home-made, of course, as were the ingenious whip-tops which when lashed smartly would fly twenty yards through the air and continue to spin when they came to earth, and which were sometimes slotted so that they hummed like little aeroplanes. As for hopscotch, all that was needed was a piece of chalk; while tipcat demanded merely a
peg sharpened at both ends and a stout stick with which to slog it. Only marbles could not be manufactured in Double Alley; you had to buy them, twenty-four for a penny, at any of the little nondescript shops which sold everything from babies' comforters to butterfly-nets. The big glass ones, streaked with tricolour whorls of red, white and blue, cost much more—sometimes as much as a halfpenny each. These were the sovereigns in the guttersnipe currency; and when one rolled down the muddy gutter and fell with a plop through the grating into the drain it was a tragedy indeed.

Marbles had a strange, an ancient, and a poetic terminology which Alfie knew and paraded, but which to us was a mystery only half understood; we never truly mastered it. Other games, even more obscure, had wonderful rhymes associated with them, snatches of song, outlandish catches, and curious fragments of mumbo-jumbo which ran like this:

“Egdom, pegdom, penny-a-legdom,
Popped the lorum gee.
    Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
    Stick, stock, stone dead,
Out goes she.”

That sounded like poetry to us, half-heard through the window; it sounds like a sort of poetry to me still.

It must have been about this time that we made the acquaintance of three good-for-nothings whose present disrepute—for they were notorious cadgers, scroungers, poachers and petty thieves —was somewhat mitigated by their past history of great deeds done in distant battles. What battles and where we never knew: Pistol frequently talked airily of Zulus and Afghans, Bardolph was accustomed to use fearful oaths which he said came from the Sudanese, and it was pretty well established that Nym at the age
of seventeen had played some minor part in the relief of Lady-Smith. However, the Army had discovered before long that the three of them were more trouble than they were worth; so they had returned to Elmbury and to the dark disastrous alleys in which they had been spawned. We would watch them loafing and leering at the Double Alley entrance, chasing the wenches, begging from passers-by, and more than once we would see them borne away to the police-station for some offence of drunkenness or brawling.

Seen through the window, they were to us figures of high romance; we communicated with them by signs, and sometimes to the dismay of Old Nanny held conversation with them in the street. It was Bardolph who taught me how to make my first catapult, and Pistol, I think, from whom I picked up a lot of weird expressive phrases which shocked my parents.

At the age of thirty-five or so, they were already confirmed and incorrigible rogues. Magistrates and police despaired of them. And yet there was nothing mean nor sordid about their misdemeanours. Sheer mischief and a sort of impishness illuminated all their crimes. They had an air and even a kind of grace in wrong-doing; and although officially Elmbury had to regard them as a pest, the majority of people were inclined to look upon them as licensed jesters whom we should be sorry to lose. At Christmas-time they always formed themselves into a ragtime band, with tins and penny-whistles, and held the passers-by to ransom, and went begging from pub to pub until they were too drunk to continue any farther. On these occasions they always made their first call at Tudor House, since it was opposite their starting-point in Double Alley, and they would kick up a great and merry row outside the front door, beating on their tins and catawauling their seasonal song: