The Day Gone By (15 page)

I realize now that it was chiefly the
sound
of Mr Mosdell and his shop which has remained with me. Mr Mosdell had some handicap to one of his feet, which caused his movement round the chair to consist of a firm, hard step with one foot followed by a quick slide with the other. As he worked he talked quietly, with pauses between, and as a rule kept the conversation two-way by asking questions. My father, who liked and respected him, tended to become more fluent than usual.

Mr M. (in a low voice, spoken only to the customer in the chair):

‘They've been saying, Doctor' (snip, snip) ‘that it's very likely to turn out' (snip, snip) ‘a wet summer.' (Bonk, slide.) ‘What do you think?'

Dr A.: ‘'Shouldn't be surprised. ‘Dare say it'll rain if it can.'

Mr M.: ‘If it rains in July' (snip, snip) ‘'may clear up for August, and that'll be good for the holidays, won't it? I'm just going to take the clippers now, Doctor. Will you be going away yourself at all?'

Dr A.: “Shouldn't think so.' (In fact, as I have said, he never went away.) Half-singing, ‘Oh, I
don't
like to be beside the seaside.

Mr M. (bonk, slide): “Doesn't suit everybody. ‘Gets very crowded these days, Doctor, don't you think?' (Soft susurration of clippers.) ‘Sit down, Mr Inch; I'm just on finished with Dr Adams.'

Dr A.: ‘Yes, I do. Waste of money as a rule, I think. Much better stay here.'

The snug shop, with Mr Mosdell's conversation, which was much the same to everyone, was another thing that made you feel grown-up, for your hair needed cutting like anyone else's, and at the end you were always asked if you wanted anything on it, even though you'd said no many times. (Well, you might have changed, mightn't you? And it made a polite conclusion.)

However, there was more than this to Mr Mosdell. He was a serious self-educator. I don't know whether or not he was a member of the W.E.A., but he certainly studied a great deal. I remember sitting in his chair one morning while he snipped away, talking knowledgeably about the Pharaohs and the culture of ancient Egypt. Yet there was nothing in the least boastful or pretentious about this. He certainly wasn't showing off, and I think the proof is that although at the time I had known him for some while, this side of him came to me as a surprise. I only hope I didn't show it for I was a tactless boy.

He once told me a story of his youth. ‘When I was a young fellow, a friend of mine and me, we used to go out most Sundays and walk to Reading along the Bath Road. About eighteen miles I suppose. Of course, in those days there were no cars, no motorbikes, nothing o' that. It was a nice country walk: we used to pick the flowers. We'd get to Reading in the late afternoon and there was a little cafe which was always open on Sundays. We used to have eggs and bacon and sausages and from there it was only a bit of a stroll to the station. We'd catch the train back to Newbury in the evening.

‘One Sunday evening we were just finishing up at the cafe when Reg, my friend, says to me “You sure of the time, Bill? Only it feels later, somehow.” We found my watch had stopped! Dear oh law! We fairly pelted down to the station, just in time to see the train going out. It was the only train there was.'

‘Whatever happened, Mr Mosdell?'

‘Why, we walked it; every step of the way. ‘Took us all night; we were tired out already, you see. And of course we knew our parents would have no idea what had happened to us or where we were. Three times we were stopped by policemen that night. We got back home just in time to shave and go to work.'

That would have been, I suppose, in the 'nineties or about the turn of the century, when the Bath Road was still much as it had always been. It must also have been before Mr Mosdell acquired his bad foot, however that came about.

My father always liked to mention at home that he was going to have his hair cut. I think he reckoned he had a bargain, and he certainly liked Mr Mosdell's conversation. ‘I'm going to see the Merry Mosdell after I've been to the hospital,' he would say, ‘so I may be late for lunch.' And off he would set in high good humour, perhaps singing

‘She was once my Twanky-doodleum, but now alas
she

Plays kissy-kissy with an officer in the Artill
eree
.'

Or again,

‘I should like to meet 'im with ‘is nice, new tart.

Then hup would go Antonio and ‘is ice cream cart.'

In time the Merry Mosdell grew old, and my father bestirred himself on his behalf. In those days it was not altogether easy to get into almshouses in Newbury if you had no church connections. I don't know about the Merry Mosdell, but my father certainly had none. He had been a boy at a Woodard school (King's College, Taunton) in the eighteen-eighties, and this had effectually turned him against church-going for life; though he habitually read the Bible, and during the war told me that he used to pray for my brother and myself. However, he had enough local influence to get the Merry Mosdell and Mrs M. appointed to a comfortable almshouse in the Newtown Road, and thus confirmed his good will towards another friend.

In 1946, when my father lay dying, I used to use part of the precious petrol ration to drive the Merry Mosdell the mile from the almshouse to our home, where he would shave my father in bed. The talk was the same. Like bird-song, it didn't change.

The True Messiah was likewise a fine stroke of domestic economy. Brassicas, and vegetables such as parsnips and carrots, we never needed to buy; nor apples, for we ate our own. But exotic fruit had to be bought. Market day in Newbury was Thursday, and of course fruit was sold cheaper there than in the fruiterers' shops. The marketeers didn't deliver, but none the more for that. It was easy enough - yes, it was - to park the car in the marketplace. The problem was to find a market fruiterer of quality, for of course more than one of them tended to sell inferior stuff mixed up with what you saw on top. However, fortunately my father discovered the True Messiah - and believed.

J. Messaias and Co. were an authentic London East End Jewish family business, with a regular circuit round market-towns of the south country. Unless you had yourself been entirely lacking in wit and humour, it would have been difficult not to develop a relationship with the two brothers.

‘'Ere, Doctor, I'll tell yer what. Yer go'er watch aht yer don't get this ‘ere vitamin deficiency what they're all on abaht naow.'

‘Do you suffer from it?'

‘Never in yer life! You 'ave a coupla pahnds o' these 'ere oranges wot I bin keeping for yer special, Doctor, and yer'll keep yerself away from yerself. ‘Be dancin' on the 'igh wire. Wrap 'em up fer the doctor, Joe. 'Ere, 'e can't carry that lot. Tike 'em across to ‘is car.'

Bananas, oranges, lemons, tomatoes and grapefruit were what my father bought, together with pears in season. (We grew pears, but not always successfully.) Grapefruit were the latest thing; quite a novelty. For some reason it became my brother's job to ‘do' them in the evenings before he went to bed. This meant cutting them in half, loosening each segment and then sprinkling on the sugar ‘to soak in' during the night. When he had finished, he put them away in the cool, stone-shelved larder against next morning's breakfast. Yet somehow I never took to them; too bitter.

‘Thursday,' my father would say. ‘What d'you want me to get from the True Messiah? Dee-ee-eeply
wailing
, dee-ee-eeply
wai
ailing —'

Like all the upper middle classes in those days, I was brought up to regard Jews as beyond the pale (have you actually
read
Bulldog Drummond?), but it didn't count if the Jews were (a) reliable tradespeople or (b) ladies and gentlemen (like the Behrends). As I grew older, it amused me to observe how my mother was able without - apparently - the least sense of inconsistency, to switch almost between two breaths. ‘Mrs Somerset says those nasty Jews are building a lot more houses up at Donnington.' ‘Oh, Daddy' (for she called him Daddy, as we did), ‘Mrs Cohen rang up, and said Wendy seemed to be getting over the ‘flu very well, but could you go in and see her this afternoon or tomorrow morning? She asked about Katharine: we had quite a little chat.'

Now that I have two Jewish publishers, a Jewish accountant and a Jewish literary agent, I feel I have unravelled this strange tangle in which I became unconsciously enmeshed during childhood.

Mr Dalby was an archetypal figure; and indeed I can never go into a greenhouse without remembering him. He was head gardener to that same, fearsome Mr Baxendale, at his fine establishment above the race course, on the edge of Greenham Common. Mr Baxendale was a patient, and it was while sitting in the car one morning in the drive outside his house, waiting for my father, that I first watched red squirrels. They came down from a cedar and scampered about on the grass.

Mr Dalby was always correctly dressed as a head gardener, in shirt-sleeves, brown waistcoat with watch-chain, and a brown bowler hat. He had a short beard, too. Towards me he was grave though kindly in manner. He must have been a north countryman, for I remember how oddly it struck me that he talked of ‘cootting off the boods'. His long, knowledgeable conversations with my father, as they walked together through the greenhouses, made me realize that gardening is not a job or a hobby but a sacred responsibility (as to Adam and Eve). Years later, when I first became a householder in Islington, and encountered a neighbour – a barrister - who did nothing whatever to his back garden, it embarrassed me as an indecency might have. I did not avoid him, but I avoided all mention of the matter, which seemed inexcusable.

Mr Dalby was an expert on carnations. They grew for him in hundreds; scarlet, white, streaked, lemon yellow, pink and darkest red. Their scent, above the still, ferny pool for the watering-cans, also seemed coloured; opulent and sumptuous as oriental robes, intensely aristocratic yet in no way frightening (like the parties). It was at one and the same time natural, yet a smell of culture and wealth, so that one thought of languid, slant-eyed beauties with fans, leaning upon curved bridges beneath cobalt-blue skies, gazing down at the golden fishes half visible below their roof of water-lilies. One carnation does not possess this magical quality. It requires hundreds, blooming on the stem in humid, windless air.

The scale on which Mr Dalby was able to do things enraptured me. He had about twelve people under him. There were whole beds of penstemon and gladioli, banks of lilies blooming half beneath the trees, expanses of bright red salvias, whole hothouses full of great mop-head chrysanthemums. Through my father I had already learned to love roses: it was through Mr Dalby that I learned to love ferns. I had hitherto had little or nothing to do with ferns. The south country, unlike, say, the Lake District, has few wild ones, and what there were in our conservatory had never caught my eye beyond the primulas and cyclamen. Mr Dalby had fern-houses; and to me, with my penchant for a surrounding refuge, for seclusion and solitude, these were wonderful places. There were no colours; only the various ranks of varied green rising all around: no scents except the smell of moist greenery; no sound except the infrequent drip of a tap into water. I used to try to be left alone in the fern-houses. Then - or so it seemed - the singularity of each fern - the undivided fronds of a Hart's Tongue, the lacy, weightless quality of a Maidenhair - could impart itself. You had to keep still as though you were watching birds; ferns spoke in low voices. They didn't come at you like orchids (for Mr Dalby had those, too. Yet somehow they didn't bowl me over; he sensed this and wisely refrained from dwelling on them).

Mr Dalby once gave me a maidenhair fern for a personal possession. It was a scion, for I remember him potting it himself It grew and thrived, and remained healthily in the conservatory until Oakdene was sold in 1939. What happened to it then I don't know.

Six years old. 1926: the year of the General Strike. I heard and knew little enough about that at the time, even though we had just got a wireless. (I remember it had a lidded cabinet and inside it a small picture of a polar bear. No doubt some true radio buff will be able to tell me what sort of a set it was.)

Day by day, at winter's end, the big field across from Monkey Lane was ploughed - the field which led across to the Bluebell Wood. If you were in the kitchen garden or the paddock, you would near the horses come jingling and clinking up to the top of the field, followed by the ploughman's cry of ‘Log off!' Then they would turn the plough and rest for a minute, until he called ‘Log on!' and off they would set on the four or five hundred yards back to the Bluebell Wood. They did this steadily all day, with the plovers wheeling and calling above them.

In what seemed to me the early morning (while the Marguerite bird sang), I would hear the village children going by – walking down Wash Hill to school in Newbury, well over a mile away. Sometimes odd, ragged groups of adults and children were to be seen going the other way, pushing rough, home-made handcarts or old pram chassis.

‘Who are those?' I asked my mother.

Those are the Penwooders,' she told me.

Penwood is an extensive tract of woodland in north Hampshire (most of it's still there), between the Enborne brook and Highclere. In those days it was common for poor people from Newbury to trudge the two or three miles up Wash Hill and out to Penwood to pick up and bring home as much ‘firing' (e.g.,
The Tempest,
II, 2,

Caliban:
‘No more dams I'll make for fish,

Nor fetch in firing

At requiring,

Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish . . .')

as they could handle. Hence the handcarts. But when you think how quickly wood burns, it still seems sad that they should have found these expeditions worth the time and trouble. They had little, if any, coal to keep in the bath. I used to feel uncomfortable and guilty to see them go by. They were hard-faced and ragged, and I knew I didn't deserve not to be.