The Day Gone By (4 page)

What a child wants in a tree is breadth; and pliant boughs near the ground, so that he can readily get up into it. There was one tree – a blossoming tree on the western edge of the Wild Wood – which I now know to have been an amelanchier (probably
lamarckii,
for it was a fair size – not by any means a shrub). The modest spring blossom was near-white and the foliage tinged with red. It had horizontal boughs, springy but entirely reliable. I could be down that tree in seconds, hang-and-drop, hang-and-drop and onto the ground. I used to sit up in it and watch my elders playing tennis, for it almost overhung one end of the court. One summer, using dust-sheets, I made a tree-house in the topmost boughs; but soon dismantled it. It was frowsty: the dust-sheets grew damp and smelly, while on the one hand you couldn't look out properly and on the other, everyone could see it and know you were there. I called this tree The Thinking Tree. You could sit up there, rocking gently on a pliant branch, and think out your problems – such as they ever were.

Ah, but the oaks! For the child tree-climber the oak is the acme, the
ne plus ultra.
The real problem is to get up into it, for a decent oak has a round, branchless trunk going up eight or ten feet. I had to grow older before I could tackle the great oaks along the paddock-hedges. To start with, I had to be big enough to be able to carry a step-ladder down there. (I couldn't ask someone else to do that.) The only alternative was to try a flying leap at the far end of a lateral branch, but they weren't low enough for a small child.

Once up into the fork, what a prospect opened! The tree appeared vast, a world in itself. You could not only climb to the top; you could explore out along each of about five great, lateral branches, as far as they would bear you. That took a whole afternoon. One tree overhung the lane, and you could pelt passers-by with acorns. They took it good-humouredly enough. ‘'Ullo, young doctor; still up to tricks, then?' ‘You wants come down out o' that; I'll give you what-for.'

If I were put up into any common tree today, blindfold, I think I could identify it by touch and smell.

My greatest friend at this time was the little girl across the road, Jean Leggatt, whose father was also a doctor. Jean was just two months younger than I, and as babies we had been pushed out in our prams together; she by her dear nursemaid Minnie, and I by my no less dear nursemaid Constance. Constance was a Cripps. Like the Starkadders at Cold Comfort, there have always been Crippses at Wash Common. There were probably some on the touchline at the first battle of Newbury in 1643, and there are some now. I loved Constance dearly, even though she did address me as ‘Baby': I knew it was from affection. (It certainly wasn't American: this was before the days of talking pictures.) I loved Jean dearly, too, and had vague ideas that one day I would marry her. We have remained friends all our lives and she lives not far away now.

One June afternoon Jean and I were playing in the paddock, when she suggested that we should strip buttercup petals and the little red flowers of the sorrel, and mix them together. It became clear that Jean had done this before: she was purposeful; we soon had quite a nice little heap, which she regarded with satisfaction.

‘What do you do with it?' I asked.

‘You throw it at people,' answered Jean sedately.

We duly showered Minnie and Constance with this beautiful confetti. They thought it was fun — country girls didn't have ‘hairdo's' in those days: though Constance did enquire whatever the mistress was going to say, for it was ‘regular all over: no gettin' rid of it.' She still had some when she bathed me that evening. I can't speak for Minnie.

Every first of May, the village children used to black their faces, dress up in such gaudy finery as they could get hold of - the general effect was sort of gipsyfied - and come round with a maypole. This they set up in the front drive and danced round it, singing

‘First of May,
Sooty-bob day;
Give me a penny I'll go away,
All round the 'ouse.'

As I suppose this must be a genuine folk rhyme, I may as well give the air. (It's not in Cecil Sharp.)

From my mother they used to get perhaps twopence or threepence. They couldn't, however, expect anything from my father. It was begging. His ideas had been formed well before the days of Cecil Sharp, and the preservation of charming old customs hadn't been thought of - or not in Martock, anyway.

The carol singers used to come, too. There was no organized carol-singing. Several groups of three or four village children would come during the season (not more than three or four; that would have made the ‘split' too small). Their repertoire was small, too. ‘Good King Wenceslas', ‘Nowell', ‘Once in Royal David's City' and ‘O come all ye faithful' were about the size of it. In those days you never heard ‘We Three Kings' or the partridge in a pear tree. Music in schools has come on a lot since then, of course. Once, I remember, in an Uncle Ernest-like spasm of excessive liberality, I had to be physically restrained from going to the front door and giving the carol singers half-a-crown which someone (Aunt Lilian, I think) had given me early for Christmas. They were quite right to restrain me. It was, in purchasing power, a very considerable sum. It might have been appropriate, perhaps, from the head of a household - though it would have been devilish generous — but from a little boy it would have been downright embarrassing and could only have led the village children to dislike me for a little beast who had all that money to waste.

I suppose it may have been something to do with my own delight in singing. I loved it. I was brought up to love it. My mother sang to me as a matter of course. She sang to me in the bath or in bed or while I was getting dressed. (Constance and she used to share these jobs, for Constance was also a housemaid, with appropriate duties.) If I happened to be ill in bed, she would sing while I was convalescent. Here's one of her songs.

‘Johnny used to grind the coffee mill

And mix up the sugar with the sand.

When the shop was shut, at the corner pub,

Drinks all round he'd stand.

He grinds a different mill just now

And he's breaking up a lot of stone:

And all because the poor boy mixed up

His master's money with his own.'

Here's the air.

She told me that when she was a nurse the medical students used to come round outside the wards with banjos and boaters (just like Uncle Ernest) and that that was one of their favourite songs.

‘Oh, and Sister used to get so cross!
“Will
you girls come away from that window and get on with your
work?”
and “Johnny used to
grind
the coffee mill” coming up from outside . . .'

I wasn't altogether clear what the song meant, but it was one I loved and used to ask for again and again.

My mother sang traditional songs, too. (Not folk songs. Real folk songs have never been popular songs, of course. I quote from the Introduction to the
Penguin Book of English Folk Songs:
‘An old Suffolk labourer with a fine folk song repertory and a delicate, rather gnat-like voice, once remarked: “I used to be reckoned a good singer before these here
tunes
came in.” The
tunes
he spoke of with such scorn had come in with a vengeance, and it seemed that his kind of songs, once so much admired, would be swept away by the flood of commercial popular music.')

I remember, once, being convalescent in bed and my mother coming back from the town in high feather. We had been talking of getting a book of songs, chiefly for the words, for my mother couldn't read music: either she knew a tune or she didn't. ‘Dicky, I've
got
a book, and it's got “Clementine” and “John Peel” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” and all those!' I think we started in right away. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle', of course, was also a mystery to me. Later, I used to think it must be about a runaway slave. Now, I think it's about a Confederate deserter in the Civil War.

My mother used to tell me, too, about Violet Lorraine in
The Bing Boys,
and sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world'. And of course there was ‘All the nice girls love a sailor' and ‘Tipperary' and many more.

I think that if you want a child to grow up to love music, singing to it is important. The thing was, my mother enjoyed the singing as much as I did, and
I was the only person she could do it with.
Otherwise she would have been self-conscious. I don't know why, but somehow my mother couldn't have sung with my brother on the piano. She had to be unaccompanied and uncriticized.

She read to me, too. Beatrix Potter, of course. And Pooh. This was the heyday of A. A. Milne - 1924 to 1928. Everyone read
When We Were Very Young
and Pooh: everyone quoted them. Everyone knew that Christopher Robin went down with Alice, and that he said his prayers. What do I think of it now? I think a lot of the light verse is pleasant for a child, but needs to be mixed up with better stuff. As for the stories, I think them too trivial, but they are redeemed by the marvellous characters. Characters are the essence of fiction. This is the limitation of folk tales, of course: marvellous stories and no characters. The prince is a prince and the dragon is a dragon like other dragons. ‘Pooh' will survive on the characters all right, no danger. But Beatrix Potter will survive on story, style and characters. She reads much better than Pooh once you're grown-up and, as C.S. Lewis said, ‘A book that's not worth reading when you're sixty is not worth reading when you're six.' I wouldn't say Pooh is not worth reading, but I do think there's a detectable condescension and self-conscious ‘cuteness' about it.

My mother also read me poetry. Robert Louis Stevenson's
Child's Garden of Verses,
and ‘Young Lochinvar' and ‘John Gilpin' and ‘The Pied Piper' and ‘Up the Airy Mountain' and pretty well everything else that a child can take in. I used to shiver at ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci', and indeed I'd think twice, myself, before letting it loose on a small child. The great virtue of Stevenson, as I see it now, is that it's poetry for poetry's sake - not poetry telling stories. You can start a child on pure poetry with Stevenson.

As I got older, my father used to read to me, too. He wouldn't have read Beatrix Potter - and certainly not Pooh - but he would read R.M. Ballantyne -
The Coral Island, The Gorilla Hunters,
etc. - and
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
; and even the ‘Dimsie' stones of Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Above all, we read
Dr Dolittle.
The Dr Dolittle books were coming out new at this time, 1922 to 1932. (Hugh Lofting evidently wrote at great speed.) The shortcomings of the Dolittle books are easy enough for an adult to pin down. The animals, in their mentalities, are really just human beings in a way in which the animals in the
Jungle Books
are not (or not quite). For example, the White Mouse knows what grand opera is, and Too-Too the owl can do arithmetic. But Lofting wrote with warmth and humour, and again, the characters are likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for animals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr Dolittle must answer for it.

Here are some lines from a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen, remembering those early days.

‘I remember all my road, the tiny lanes
Running between the honeysuckled hedges;
The streams, and moorhens twining through the sedges;
The snails upon the shining hornbeam leaves,
And glow-worms in the evening grass.
I remember how that Childhood used to pass;
The great red moon, the scent of August phlox,
Grasshoppers in the fields, the chiming clocks
Scarce audible from the far town below;
The yellow corn-sheaves and the sky above;
All simple things, Memories that all men know,
The earliest foundations of this love.'