The Day Gone By (6 page)

The men on the laying - and all workmen in general - my mother used to call ‘Jims'. (‘There'll be some Jims coming tomorrow, Dicky, to do the front gate. You can help them if you like.' The ‘helping', of course, consisted of standing about and chatting - picking their brains, really, for like all children I wanted to learn what it was like to be grown-up. You acquired ideas from things let fall rather than from direct instruction. E.g., ‘You wants t'ang on to that there box, ‘Arry. See 'im Friday, old Jack'll give you threepence for ‘e.') A whole army of Jims, of course, turned up to tarmacadam the Andover Road, equipped with wonderful things - tar-boilers, tar-spreaders, broad rakes and a real steam-roller. Nearer and nearer to the house they came, day by day, up Wash Hill, until they were actually outside, great men with walrus moustaches, thick braces and string round the knees of their trousers, calling out things like ‘Couple o' foot, then, Fred' and ‘Take 'er steady, Joe.'

One of these Jims I remember clearly. He had come into our garage yard for some reason or other, and had been talking to Thorn, our gardener, about a screwdriver or some such. I was around and he began talking to me. He told me, seriously and earnestly, about soldiering on the western front during the Great War, addressing me as ‘Boy'. I liked this. It seemed more grownup than ‘Master Richard' or ‘Young doctor'. Jim Hawkins to the life! ‘And when we come out o' them there trenches, boy,' he said, ‘we was proper
lousy.
Yer, proper lousy we was!' I could sense all right how nasty this must have been.

Then he began explaining to me how a pistol worked. ‘That's what they calls the mechanicism, see, boy,' he said, demonstrating with his left fore-finger crooked in the palm of his right hand. ‘The mechanicism of the trigger.' I was impressed. No stranger grownup had ever talked to me like this before - seriously setting out to communicate grown-up matters, without banter. Tobacco, sweat, an old waistcoat all ragged, rough hands ingrained with tar. He was majestic: I'd have done anything for him.

But as a matter of fact it was he who did anything for me. A few days later Constance and I were going up the village to Leader's, when by the pond we came upon a whole squad of Jims gathered round the steam-roller. They had laid the tar and raked it and now it was to be rolled. My friend was among them, and he began chatting up Constance. After a bit he said ‘You wants get up in there, boy, 'ave a look. That's steam-powered, that is.' He lifted me up bodily and the man who was driving the roller took me from him. Inside the roller the fire was flaming before my very face, roaring in its iron boiler. The steam blew back at us out of the funnel in front. Then the driver, leaving me to myself, set to and spun the control-wheel by its projecting handle. There was a tremendous, accelerating crescendo of puffs and heavy rumblings as with a crunching and a shaking, we began to go
backwards
! Forward and back we went, forward and back, Constance watching half-afraid. (‘Whatever'll the mistress -') I held on tight. When at last they lifted me down I was far too much over-awed to say Thank you. This was something like an experience! I suppose my feelings were more or less equivalent to those of an adult witnessing a volcanic eruption.

The Jims, day by day, moved on until they were far off. No more summer dust on the hawthorn - for ever. But at least they'd compensated me as handsomely as they could.

They built a bridge, too, did those Jims — or some Jims did. The nearest water to our home which you could call a river was the little Enborne brook — still, as then, the county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire. As a child, I was familiar with two crossings. One, a little over a mile away to the south of and below the Wash Common plateau, was Wash Water, on the Andover Road (the A343, as it now is). This had had a road bridge since before I was born. The other, about a mile to the east, was Newtown Water, where the A34, the main Southampton to Birmingham road, crosses the Enborne. When I was a very small boy, in the early ‘twenties, this was just a ford with a footbridge, and I remember being driven through it in the car. As part of the job of tarring and modernizing that road, the bridge which is there today was built. Whenever I join the volume of traffic which almost continuously crosses Newtown Water now, it really brings home to me how greatly times have changed in sixty years.

Our nearest friends on Wash Common — apart from Dr Leggatt, Jean's father, who lived directly opposite — were the Jessops. Mr Jessop was a stockbroker, and they had an only son, Hugh, who was about ten years older than I (grown-up, in fact, to me). Hugh was one of the first pupils at Stowe, the brand-new and rather revolutionary public school which was beginning to make its name under its famous headmaster, Roxburgh. (Hugh later had a distinguished and gallant naval career in the war and then became a silver dealer in London.)

There were two things that fascinated me about ‘Uncle' Jessop's house. The first were the lions. As you went through the front door into the porch, you were confronted (head on, if you were only five) by a pair of jet-black lions carved in ebony. (They were oriental, as I now suppose.) They were each about as big as a big dog, and sitting on their haunches, snarling with open mouths and bared white teeth. Each carried in its front paws an ivory tusk. Although to an adult they would appear very much stylized, they were far and away the biggest and most realistic works of visual art that I had yet seen. I was terrified of them, and always had to be led past, with reassurance. Uncle Jessop, though always kind, was an imposing person with a big moustache and a growly voice, and it occurs to me now that subconsciously I may have rather lumped him and the lions together.

The other thing was the fountain. Although, as I have said, our own garden was big and delightful, it had no water. Uncle Jessop had a lily pond with a fountain. The fountain could be controlled by a foot-high, upright iron tap in the gravel, and to me this was a source of great pleasure and excitement. You could turn the jet into a circular fan of water, its thin streams, like rain, falling all around to transform the surface of the pool into winking, plopping coruscation. You could then bring it up higher, into the faint semblance, perhaps, of a standing figure, an ondine made all of ascending water. And then, finally - if they'd let you, for you weren't allowed long; it was too much indulgence of a little boy with mechanism that was not considered a toy — you could turn it into a single, immensely tall spout, which shot up into the air as high as the first-floor windows and fell back onto the surface with a most satisfying smack and splash. I always felt a little guilty about going all the way with the fountain, because you had to plead for it to get a grudging ‘Well, all right, but only for a minute, mind.' I was not to know that fountains are among the oldest and favourite toys of mankind, and that kings and emperors have played with and delighted in them. (My brother, good pianist as he was, was not quite up to Ravel's
Jeux d'eau.
I was about nineteen when I first heard that; it evoked an immediate response of recognition.)

Another neighbour, with whom I was to become well acquainted as the years went by, was Captain Cornwallis. (That is not his true name.) He attracted me - as he attracted many - by his generosity, high spirits and enjoyment of life. Captain Cornwallis (I learned all this much later, of course) had originated God knows where, and before the First World War had been a strolling, needy adventurer - a sort of figure from the pages of ‘Sapper' - with nothing much for ammunition except a pleasing geniality and a great ability for things like golf and bridge, which he played for money. Wounded in the war, he found himself in hospital, being tended by an ugly little V.A.D. nurse called Sally. From gossip he learned that Sally came from a wealthy family and had a lot of money. As soon as he was convalescent he set about courting her, and was successful.

Sally Cornwallis was very small — tiny — with no physical attractions (to say the least) and so little intellect that even a child could perceive the lack. It was hard to tell whether she liked you or not, because her manner and brief speech, unsmiling and flat, were the same to everyone - except servants, to whom she was a tyrant and a bully. (When first married, the Cornwallises had spent some time in India.) Nevertheless, she and the Captain were happy enough on her money (though the Captain went in for brief absences now and then, which earned contemptuous inferences from my father - probably justified, I now think; though I personally can't say I blame him or see that they did any harm).

The Cornwallises arrived on Wash Common during my early childhood. The Captain bought a farm, its fields comprising the stony, unproductive upland of the plateau above the Enborne. It was about half a mile from our home. He employed two men, but the place was not a true farm; not a going, commercial concern. When not playing bridge or golf, though, he could shoot rabbits on the land. They had two sons; the elder, Duncan, was about my age and a cripple, his speech badly defective and his legs in irons. He could barely walk and used to get about the place on a tricycle. The younger, Arthur, was a year or two younger than myself, and as the years went by became my close associate, for I grew up fairly proficient at swimming and at hitting various kinds of ball, and the Captain thought it good for Arthur to have a slightly older friend who could extend him a little. During our ‘teens our friendship became more limited, since Arthur grew up a straightforward, practical, outdoor fellow, while I became a swot who went the length of liking poetry and classical music. We remained friends, however, right up till after Hitler's war, when Arthur (‘Can't farm here: it's nothing but damn' pioneering on gravel') emigrated to Canada, where he has done well.

The great attraction and benefit to me of the Captain was his easy-going generosity. What was his was yours, in effect. He built a swimming-pool and a squash court, and these our family were free to use whenever we liked. The summer holidays of the ‘thirties, when I was in my ‘teens, to a considerable degree revolved round the Cornwallises - sauntering up there in the hot mornings, along the verge of the big cornfield, to swim; tennis in the afternoon and perhaps a bridge lesson from the Captain in the evening. The Captain was most articulate and liked to talk gaily and freely, and this always seemed strange to me - almost unnatural - for my own father, of whom I was so fond, spoke little and smiled hardly at all. I have never forgotten that when my sister Katharine was about twenty-two, she and a friend called Dorothea Rowand decided to enter for an amateur tennis tournament at Hunstanton in north Norfolk and have a bit of fun at the seaside into the bargain. Captain Cornwallis, unasked, lent them his own Bugatti - a superb car - to drive up there and back and to use as their own for the holiday.

My father detested the Captain for a jumped-up cad and a bounder, though he never tried to stop us going up there and mostly kept his feelings to himself. Now and then, however, he would come out with brief and contemptuous references to patent lies that the Captain had told, or ill-bred boasts which he had made at the South Berks Club in Newbury, or with a scornful mention of his ‘farm', which was no farm at all. I liked the Captain and I liked my father, and sometimes I would try to mediate. ‘But, Daddy, even if he is a bounder, you must agree he's very generous.' ‘Yes,' replied my father, ‘with other people's money.'

Another time, when I was older - perhaps sixteen - and presumably to be relied upon not to repeat things, he and I were talking about the Captain when I asked some question or other about how he had come to be where he was.

‘Why, he married that woman for her money, of course,' answered my father. ‘You couldn't marry her for anything else, could you?'

I realize now that to my father, who had endured disapprobation and family hostility to marry my mother without a penny, for love, this would seem the ultimate in caddishness. And yet I myself am not so sure. Mrs C. lived as happily as she could well have hoped to. She liked and respected her husband, who was always genial and friendly to her. She had two sons and, under his dispensation, more fun than, with her looks and disposition, she could possibly have had otherwise. Whatever infidelities he went in for he kept well away from his own doorstep, and I never heard the least trace of a cross word between them. Yes, he was a sharp scamp (he could always spot in a moment how any card trick was done), but one of Falstaffian charm. I wonder, might my father's resentment have had in it an ingredient of jealousy? He himself had always been a shy, correct and upright man. ‘Lo, these many years have I served thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandments. Yet thou never gavest me a kid . . .

We never had quite enough money for our establishment. Throughout the eighteen years of my childhood the servants gradually grew fewer and fewer, until at last there was none. My father suffered much financial anxiety, I know. But I think I perceive, now, another factor also. He himself, as he always used to say, was a poor mixer; except for my elder sister's and brother's tennis parties in the summer, we didn't entertain much, and we never went away for holidays. My father, celibate for forty years, had for all I know lived a rather restricted life, working at home with my grandfather. His reward was his sense of his own correctness. But then he had torn up the rule-book and married my mother. Mightn't an uncharitable person possibly have compared
her
to Captain Cornwallis? (Though she played her social part admirably and had adapted very well: I doubt whether anyone round Newbury thought her socially below my father.) The Captain, coming from nowhere, could handle people and had got what he was after by means of cheek and an outgoing temperament. My father's style, on the other hand, was based on reticence and propriety. How aware was he that this was because, when put to it, he had little real force of character? There is nothing in Christian doctrine which forbids marrying for money. It was, rather, the Captain's style which my father disliked. Yet my childhood would have been far less enjoyable without the Captain.