The Day Gone By (13 page)

‘Here, you get down!' he said. ‘It's not your chair.'

The man got down, looking at my father with surly resentment.

‘Nor it ain't the lad's chair, neither,' he said.

I felt ill-at-ease and embarrassed, caught in the middle of this exchange. I was out of countenance and didn't know what I ought to do.

‘I suppose that's true,' I muttered sheepishly.

‘Don't speak to him!' said my father brusquely. ‘Don't have anything to do with him!' And with this he returned his attention to the track.

It worked, of course. The man said no more and edged away in the crowd. But the encounter taught me a lot. Silence and disregard, properly used, can be more effective than any amount of speech.

My father, like the old man in the folk tale, often had his own words for things. Some of these were simply onomatopoeic. I used to suffer, sometimes, from sneezing fits - probably hay fever, though I never thought about it. My father feared that this, if not controlled, might injure the mucous membrane in my nose by blowing it down into folds. ‘I can't have any more of that
kash
aming,' he would say reproachfully. The extraordinary thing was that that, too, worked. I usually found I could thereupon stop kashaming.

Crying, too, he disfavoured, unless there was good cause, such as a bang on the head, a blow on the funny-bone or any of the other accidents common in childhood. He didn't like you to cry for mental reasons only.

‘I don't want any of that bad bowleting, my boy, when it's time to go back to school.' He was sympathetic, though, to your feelings. ‘No one likes going back to work after a holiday,' he would say, as you struggled to hold back your tears. Or ‘All good things come to an end.'

The car - or any car, for that matter - he always called the ‘bouffam'. (In his letters to me he used to spell it ‘bougham'.) ‘I'm going into Newbury in the bouffam.' he would announce, ‘if anyone wants to come along.' The word was in common use throughout the family, and I have gone on using it with my own wife and children and anyone else who has become an intimate friend. I always supposed that this, too, was onomatopoeic, imitating the shaking reverberation of a car's engine when idling, which was general during the early decades of this century. Years later, however - one day during the late ‘seventies - I received from an American friend a page from a motor magazine: an article with the title ‘Little Known of Bouffam/Bouffum'. It appeared that there really was a car of this name during the Edwardian decade, but it had ceased to be manufactured and, as the article said, little was now known about it. I have wondered since why my father should have adopted it as a generic term for any car, including his own, for to my knowledge he never owned one of the mysterious Bouffams. During the Edwardian decade, as I have said, he had a De Dion Bouton, but all through my lifetime we had a series of Wolseleys.

A more useful word (because there is no single equivalent for it) was ‘sadbit'. In the first place, a sadbit could be literally a ‘sad bit': e.g., ‘
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is a book that's full of sadbits.' But it could also be a tragic conclusion, in reality or fiction. Here the advantage of the word was that it saved the speaker from having to go into distressing detail.

‘Daddy, what happened to those kittens that Mr Cottrell said they couldn't be doing with?'

‘It's a sadbit, I'm afraid.' Nothing more need be said.

‘Splendid chap, Keats. ‘Pity it was all such a sadbit.'

‘Well, I think if Mrs Kennedy really means to go on with that idea of a cricket match it'll probably turn out to be a very sadbit.'

‘If Ramsay MacDonald gets back in, won't that be a sadbit?'

But a sadbit could also be a person.

‘Everyone's saying the new headmaster at the grammar school's an awful sadbit.'

‘There were so many sadbits there that I came away early.'

Perhaps his best word was ‘wugular'; and this, too, I have retained, never having come across any one word that covers all its applications. Like the Geordie word ‘canny', it can mean all sorts of things. Wugular could mean anything from ‘unusual' to ‘dangerous' and from ‘sinister' to ‘sexually perverted'.

‘It's Bank Holiday tomorrow,' he might say, ‘so there'll be a lot of wugular chaps on the road. Funny fellows, comic men and clowns of private life.'

‘I saw a wugular bird out at Highclere this morning. I'm not at all sure it wasn't a brambling.'

‘I don't think I'd care to go there at night. It's a wugular sort of place.' This meant either a dangerous place or a place where you might be set upon, for my father had no superstitious fears.

‘That Edgar Allan Poe must have been a wugular chap, I should think.'

Once, when I was about twelve, having intuitively sensed something I shuddered at, without understanding, about the second master at my prep. school, I said to my father ‘I can't help feeling, Daddy, that Mr Morris is by no means free from wugularity.' ‘I'm quite
sure
of it,' replied my father, in a tone that precluded further speculation. When I grew older I came to realize that Mr Morris had been, as they say, as bent as a nine-bob note. He was a sadistic paederast, really.

At bedtime, there was always the hope that my father might come upstairs and tell me a story - for you couldn't depend on it. Often, in those days, if you asked an adult (not my father) to tell you a story, he (or she) would reply,

‘I'll tell you a story of Jackamanory,

And now my story's begun.

I'll tell you another of Jack and his brother

And now my story's done.'

This was maddening, especially as you knew what was coming as soon as they started. But my father was, as he himself would have said, upsides with this. He told many stories about Jackamanory, a little boy who used to get lost in the town, or taken to the fair or a cricket match, or even to London. But Jackamanory, in the gradual and casual way of oral bedtime stories, came to be superseded by the episodic tales of Hedgehog.

If anything makes me realize that childhood is irrecoverable, it is thinking about Hedgehog. After all these years I remember scarcely anything that Hedgehog and his friends did. I recall that they had a cricket match, and on another occasion they went to the seaside. Everything they did was more or less trivial, homespun and not by any means cliff-hanging. There were no spies, chases, bombs or arrests. Looking back on them now, the stories seem a constituent part of their occasion; inseparable from the time and place where they were told, the nature and style of the person who told them and of the person who listened. My father's narrative manner was low-keyed and undramatic, pausing and conversational. His listener was fully receptive and uncritical, tired after a long day of childhood, relaxed after supper and a bath, happy with the kind of story which was familiar and singular to himself; and with the gratification of the story-teller being there, leaning with clasped hands upon the high brass rail at the foot of the bed. You were free to ask questions and interrupt. No, it didn't really matter what Hedgehog actually did, while the swifts flew high and screaming outside in the summer dusk or the gas fire quietly poppled in winter. I am fairly sure, from what I can remember, that he was ad-libbed. His evening adventure was ephemeral as the evening itself and the style of the telling became as familiar as the smell of my father's old tweed coat.

So then they would leave the door open with the landing light on, and I would set about going to sleep, often saying over to myself one of Constance's wonderful verses. Wherever can she have got them? It must, surely - it can only - have been from the Girl Guides.

‘I went to the pictures tomorrow.

I took a front seat at the back.

I fell from the floor to the gallery

And broke a front bone in my back.

The band struck up but did not play,

So I sat down and walked away.'

‘The following Sunday being Ash Wednesday, a meeting will be held in the vestry to decide which colour the wall shall be whitewashed. Admission free, pay at the door. Seats inside, sit on the floor. We will now sing -

‘We went to the animals' fair.

The birds and the beasts were there.

The grey baboon by the light of the moon

Was combing his auburn hair.

The monkey fell out of his bunk

And slid down the elephant's trunk.

The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees,

But what became of the monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey -'

There were others. One I remember proving so fascinating, later, to the boys at my prep. school that I used to have to say it over and over again.

‘There was an old man from beyond Japan
And his name was Ching Ching Chinaman.
His body was long and his legs were short
And this funny man couldn't walk or talk.
Jing jang jorum, bibba labbalorum
One cheer more for the hippy happy day.
Go, go, go to the utty utty i,
Tiddle-fi, tiddle-fi, Chinese doll.
They took him up to the top of the hill
And they rolled him down like a Beecham's pill.
They drove a cab to the Brighton pier
And they poured him out like a glass of beer.
Jing jang jorum-'

But I would be asleep.

During the nineteen-twenties Newbury was a trim, self-contained little town — an ancient borough - a market centre for local farmers and the horse-racing people of the downs. It was on the Great Western Railway, and the journey to Paddington took exactly one hour. There was a market on Thursdays and a fair at Michaelmas, though even in my infancy this had already ceased to have much to do with the local economy and had become largely a matter of coconut shies and roundabouts. But the weekly cattle-market was important business, with its herds and flocks driven along the dusty roads into town and usually, in the evening, two or three (or more) drunk and disorderly fellows man-handled away by the police. (Resisting the police was quite as common then as now.) In adolescence, during the late ‘thirties, I had no difficulty in recognizing Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, even though Newbury hadn't actually got any sheep bleating within earshot of the magistrates' courtroom. In 1921 the population was 12,295: in 1931, 13,340.

One or more of the family went into Newbury daily. In those days deliveries to the home by butchers, grocers and drapers were a matter of course, and as I grew older I got to know the delivery boys, who could sometimes be inveigled into a quick game of darts against the kitchen fence on their way from the back door. Darts was the limit, though. (‘Cricket? I'd get the sack!' said the butcher's boy when I suggested it one day.) Nevertheless my mother, delivery or no, liked to see what she was buying, particularly when it came to meat. There would be colloquies in the butcher's with beehive-haired Mrs Leach reassuring my mother, and calling upon ‘Ar-
thur
!' (ginger-moustached, bloody-handed, his cleaver hanging at the belt of his blue, white-striped apron) to corroborate her. My mother would pray my father's name in aid as a sort of frightener. ‘Dr Adams wasn't at all pleased with —' ‘Dr Adams will certainly expect —' In point of fact my father never ate a great deal and was not particular what it was. As my mother knew well, her act was a kind of charade. The Leaches, who were patients and had a prosperous farm out at Thatcham, respected and valued my father and wouldn't have dreamed of putting anything across him. All my life, up to and during the Second War, we never dealt with any other butcher. Now, the shop's long gone.

I first began ‘going down in the town' with my mother while I was still in a push-chair; though it was never a case of being made to. You could come along or not as you pleased, unless you were particularly required for anything, such as buying a new pair of shoes or helping to choose a birthday present for someone like Jean or Ann. There were three ways of covering the mile and a half. You could walk; or you could go down in ‘Mavis' (complete with Cecil); or you could latch onto my father as he set out on his morning rounds, usually about quarter to ten. What I liked best, in childhood, was walking down - from Wash Common it's downhill all the way - and then meeting my father, at about twenty to one, at the South Berks Club and being driven home to lunch. The car would be parked close by the Club, alongside the Roary Water, as we called the white, tumbling outfall from the Hovis Mill. I was always happy enough to wait, leaning against the high iron railings and watching the turbulent Kennet foaming out from the mill ducts below. There were three of them, round-arched and dark-mouthed, though as a rule only two would be in use. The Roary Water was exciting and frightening, like a ghost story, because you were safely above it, and couldn't have got over the spiked railings if you'd tried. But it was disturbing that the water came rushing so noisily out of the dark. (I remembered this, years later, when I first read
Rasselas.
)

One of my early memories is of walking hand-in-hand with my mother along Bartholomew Street, when we saw coming towards us a dirty, bearded man who was pushing up the roadway a homemade handcart, a thing of soap-boxes and old pram wheels. This was full of and hung about with dead rabbits. Their back legs were tied together and as the cart rattled along their ears and poor, eye-glazed faces swung and bobbed. The man, to leave his hands free, had tied the shafts with a bit of cord under his armpits, and as he went he was very deliberately skinning a rabbit with an old knife, and tugging off the loose fur where he had got a grip.

I burst into tears; from shock, I think, as much as pity. It was, of course, a piteous, ugly sight, but apart from that the man's unconcerned, workaday air as he plied his knife made me realize in an instant that rabbits were things, and that it was only in a baby's world that they were not.

‘It is the blight man was born for.
It is Margaret you mourn for.'