Portrait of Elmbury (8 page)

And elsewhere, all over the room, on the mantelpiece, on bookshelves, wherever there was space, the frightful creatures of Bassett's myth extended snake-like necks and stared with glazed and terrible and dissipated eyes. On the hearth two parodies of badgers sat up and begged. In a glass case were squirrels on a tree-trunk, a kind of set piece which one might describe as an extravaganza on the theme of squirrels. Over the fireplace a crested grebe, with outspread wings like a Phoenix, looked backwards from its tortured neck and gaped with open beak at the wall.

Bassett taught us the hard discipline of angling; Mr. Chorlton soon taught us its beauty, when he took us up the river on calm summer evenings and showed us how to throw a fly. He was careful not to suggest to us that this method of fishing was
necessarily superior to any other, so we grew up without any silly snobbery about floats and worms; instead we took the sensible view that the purpose of fishing is to have fun. We were equally happy, therefore, whether we were catching bleak with house-flies, or watching the long black porcupine-quill when we fished for tench and bream, trolling for pike in winter, or sitting, oh! so quietly, in the sternsheets of Mr. Chorlton's boat while with exquisite grace he swished his shining split-cane rod and sent out the cobwebby line towards the dark eddy under the overhanging willows.

It was Mr. Chorlton's custom (anathema to Bassett) while fishing to talk. He would chide the reluctant fishes with a quotation from Shakespeare, ask the favour of the immortal gods in Latin, curse a broken cast in Homeric Greek. He never talked down to us. If we didn't understand what he said we could always ask the meaning of it. And so we did, with the result that we learned a great many wise sayings in a far more pleasant way than if we had been sitting at a schoolroom desk.

I left prep school in a blaze of glory. Illicitly and in secret, like an alchymist of old, I was conducting a complicated chemical experiment in an empty form-room when the bell rang for chapel. The experiment was somewhat empirical; it consisted of mixing together a number of different substances to see if they would explode. The chapel was next door to the form-room, and boys and masters had to pass through the form-room in order to get to it. Panic-stricken, I hid my concoctions in the grate, wiped my hands on the seat of my trousers, and wearing an expression of great piety went in to my prayers. The Headmaster entered, we knelt down, and he began to pray. He had got as far as “Forgive us our trespasses” when a tremendous explosion rent the air. The whole building shuddered; bits of plaster fell off the ceiling; and soon wisps of smoke drifted across the aisle, smelling acridly of phosphorus. The Headmaster finished the prayer and led us
out in silence through the shattered form-room. The grate was blown clean out, and with it most of the chimney. Even in my terror of the consequences I could not help reflecting with justifiable pride that my experiment had succeeded.

But it was the end of term, and my last term, so the consequences were not very serious. I stuffed my trousers with brown paper, but the precaution was unnecessary. The Headmaster had delegated my punishment to Mr. Chorlton, who looked at me sternly and asked: “When you mixed those chemicals together were you trying to prove anything or were you just hoping they'd explode?”

I thought it safest to be honest. “Hoping they'd explode, sir.”

“Good. I was afraid you might have had some serious scientific purpose. If so I'd have beaten you. The educational value of chemistry is almost exactly equal to that of a jigsaw puzzle. Make stinks for fun, but if you want to
learn
things, stick to Virgil. You can go.”

Next day I had to see the Headmaster himself, to say goodbye. This was a ceremony at which, it was understood, we should be told the Facts of Life. We who were leaving all waited anxiously outside the Head's door and went in one by one. It was terrifying; we vaguely expected some sort of a revelation. What appalling mystery was about to be revealed to us? A boy came out snivelling. Our terror increased. What dreadful initiation went on behind that closed door? But when I got inside the Headmaster merely delivered a dissertation on the subject of dirty jokes. I didn't know any dirty jokes, so this rather missed its mark. However, I pretended to snivel when I came out; it seemed to be expected; and upon the face of the boy whose turn it was to enter I was pleased to see the appropriate expression of fear.

From the glorious free-and-easy prep school I went to a hateful public school where I found I was expected in summer to play a regimented kind of cricket instead of collecting butterflies and in winter to go for compulsory runs, curiously termed “Voluntaries,” instead of watching birds. I discovered that my form was still reading Ovid's
Metamorphoses
and Cæsar's
De Bello Gallico
, which I knew practically by heart; so I decided to do no work until the tasks set for preparation became more interesting.

Unfortunately Mr. Chorlton, who had instilled into me a love of the classics, had also communicated to me his own contempt for mathematics; so I decided to give up all mathetical studies also. I remained in the same form, called Upper Shell B, for three years, which was a record for the school.

But when I was not engaged in avoiding work or in escaping the consequences of having done none (exercises which required more application and ingenuity than I should have expended on the work itself) I read everything I could lay hands on, from Kipling to Shelley, from Surtees to Keats. I read all the plays of Shakespeare, including
Timon of Athens
; the poetry of Meredith and the prose of Thomas Love Peacock; the whole of
Man and Superman
, and
Tristram Shandy
four times. I even read
The Golden Asse
; it was discovered in my desk and confiscated as “indecent literature.” Two Elephant-hawk caterpillars, and a lot of Burnet moth cocoons, were also found in the desk and confiscated at the same time.

I became a kind of anarchist. On O.T.C. field days I deserted, hid in trees, and looked for birds' nests. I refused to play football, and went fishing for perch in a farmer's pond instead. As a punishment I was sent for long runs; this pleased me, because instead of running I concealed myself in a chalk quarry and looked for fossils. In form I never even attempted to solve the problems of Euclid, but instead decorated the foolscap sheet with maps of Elmbury, its confluent streams and rivers, its
rabbit-warren back-streets, its roads and lanes which led to a dozen delightful villages, all infallibly drawn from memory. And on another sheet I made a calendar of all the dreary days, and blacked them out one by one, and counted daily the remainder, until the holidays came round again.

Release from this anarchic and unhappy existence came unexpectedly before I was seventeen. My uncle was old and likely soon to retire; his promising sons had been killed in the war; the “family tradition” would be broken unless I joined the firm. It was suggested to me that if I liked to go into his office I could leave school at once. I wasn't enthusiastic about the office; but I passionately hated school, and I left it immediately, unregretful and unregretted.

During my last summer holidays a second attempt was made to teach me the Facts of Life. The vicar, who was still borrowing wildly in order that he might be still more wildly generous, presented me with three expensive books and a spinning-reel and unexpectedly asked me to go fishing with him. This surprised me, for I didn't know he was an angler; and I didn't want to go, because it was the day of Elmbury Mop Fair. This was Elmbury's annual saturnalia, roundabouts were set up in the streets, and stalls which sold sticky gingerbread, and booths where you could have your fortune told, or see the Fattest Woman in the World, and the Hairiest, and the smallest Pigmy, and the Web-footed Man, and the Nameless Delights of Paris. I should have liked to have spent the afternoon at the Fair, visiting these marvels and shying at coconuts; but it would be impolite to refuse the parson's invitation, so I rigged him up a rod, dug some worms, and we set out. It was soon apparent that the man had never fished before; because he could not bring himself to impale his worm, and I had to do it for him. We sat in silence and watched our motionless floats. It began to rain. He cleared his throat. I had a terrible premonition that he was going to
ask me if I knew the Facts of Life; and sure enough a moment later he began:

“Forgive me asking, dear boy … but your father being dead … as a great friend of your mother … and your parish priest … I feel it my responsibility. …”

I was sorry for the poor man in his embarrassment, so I told him airily, yes, I knew all: my schoolmasters, before I left, had told me all the Facts of Life. He appeared relieved; and a moment later he suggested that as the fish weren't biting we might as well go home.

I had my revenge for my wasted afternoon. I made him take off his own worm; and he was nearly sick. That evening, with Dick, Donald and Ted, I went to the Fair. We saw the Fat and the Hairy Women, the Pigmy, the Web-footed Man, and the Nameless Delights, which were so unimpressive that I have forgotten what they consisted of. We won armfuls of coconuts. We rode on the roundabouts and the swings and the cakewalk, we slid down the chute, and then stood at the bottom to watch three little wenches, with their skirts up to their middles, come tumbling down after us. We lifted them to their feet and took them on the swings. We bought them gingerbreads and sticky sweets. One was blonde, one was brunette, and one was redheaded; and later, when we left the crowded noisy streets and the weird white light of the naphtha flares, she taught me much more about Life than the parson had succeeded in doing.

The time had now come for me to be articled to my uncle and to go into his office.

I was a lanky youth of seventeen. I had an astonishing store of knowledge about a number of things which were scarcely relevant to a commercial career. I could read the New Testament in Greek and recite much of the Georgics from memory. I knew the names of most wild flowers, could recognise most butterflies and moths and tell you their life-histories, knew the
birds' songs, their nests, and eggs, and had read the whole of Geikie's
Geology
. I could sometimes catch fish when wise old anglers couldn't; could shoot, ride a horse, sail a boat. I had read without discrimination every novel, play or biography I could lay hands on, and I swallowed poetry with the voracity of a sealion swallowing fish. My method (which makes me shudder to think of it now) was to obtain from the Public Library the collected works of some poet, Tennyson or Browning or Longfellow, and read the whole lot, slap through, from page one to the end. In this fashion I had read the whole of
The Dynasts
when I was sixteen.

With these qualifications I set out to become an auctioneer.

Grandstand for Sociologists—The Office—Words—Foot-and- Mouth —The Invisible Invasion—The Wind Blows Cold—The Idle Apprentices—Come Lassies and Lads—Satellite Villages—Songs at the Salutation—Market Day—Conversation-Piece—Market-Peartness and Illiteracy—Economics of Farming—To Be a Farmer's Boy— Midnight Steeplechase—The Long View—Orchards—The Blow a-Blowing—Timber—Pubs—Roadhouse and Bar Parlour—Furniture Sales—The Crooked Craftsman—You've Got to Leave the Bed —Farewell to the Office—Turkey Trouble—We be Getting Old— Falstaff he is Dead—Tempora mutantur—Property Sale—Live and Dead Farming Stock—Tenant-Right—Ave atque Vale—The Pattern

The profession is not very highly regarded, as professions go; but if any earnest young student with a B.Sc. and little experience of life asks me the best way to begin the study of sociology I shall suggest at least two years in the office of an auctioneer.

Consider the opportunities provided by such a course. The auctioneer's job brings him in touch with every class and person; we are all, at some time in our lives, landlords or tenants, buyers or sellers. It gives him the entry, from time to time, into every house in his district, great or small. So does the doctor's profession, or the parson's; but the doctor sees people only when they are ill, or when they think they are ill, and when the parson visits people they are either on their best behaviour or on the defensive. The auctioneer sees them at their best and worst; and usually at the time when some crisis, financial or otherwise, has disrupted their lives. He sees them when the head of the house has died; when their little business has gone smash; when
they are in arrears with their rent; when the landlord has given them notice to quit; when the bum-bailie is seizing their furniture for debt; when they go bankrupt. He sees them when they are compelled by circumstances to sell their most precious possessions, and when they are covetous to buy the possessions of their neighbour. He sees homes set up, and homes broken; he sees poor men get rich and rich men ruined. He meets man in all his moods and all his manifestations: in sorrow, in avarice, in courage, in greed, in good fortune and bad, in the shadow of death itself.