Dinner, early in the afternoon, was capital: it was the last old-fashioned Dutch dinner I ever ate. It was of thick pea-soup, so thick you could have built castles with it, served in pewter bowls. In each of our bowls there was a good piece of beef sausage, the trotter of a pig and all sorts of little bits of salted pork. Half a century later my mouth still waters at the memory of that simple meal. To tell the truth, so do my eyes, for I have grown sentimental and silly. (But not so silly as to be deceived when certain grandchildren and distant cousins kiss me sweetly because a rich old man may soon be writing a will.)
Dinner, as I have said, was very good and we all gobbled and belched in honest Dutch style, then lay back in the sunshine, listening to our bellies chuckling with the pleasure of it.
The wind backed into the East and soon we had almost a following wind; every stitch of sail filled and drawing to it. Now it was a lovely day; the Mama made me more pots of coffee, brought me more honey-cake and squeaked away at her slate.
Whenever she was out of earshot the lads told me more wonderfully dirty stories; some I can remember to this day, I am ashamed to say. (It is strange that only the English and the Dutch can tell stories which are both dirty and funny; the Germans and the Americans can only tell dirty ones, the French only funny ones, the Italians only pitifully bad ones. I have never heard a good story from an Italian. The Irish, the Scotch and the Jews are in a different category: they can only tell Irish, Scotch and Jewish stories.)
Towards the evening of that day everyone agreed that we had indeed made a splendidly fast passage and that, because the tide was foul for working up the Thames, we would drop our hook outside the town of Ramsgate. Soon we three lads were in the pram – a kind of a dinghy – and the elder cried “Vaart!”, a word which strikes strangely on an English ear but simply means “give way”. However, no sooner were we a cable’s length from the ship than the father hailed us to come back. A nasty, lumpy little lop was growing up in the sea and he feared that the anchor would not hold. He was vexed about this: he explained that to go into the inner harbour was expensive and I realised that this would cost him a good little piece out of my passage-money.
“Of course,” he mused aloud, “we could go round the North Foreland and get inside the Hook of Margate. There is a good jetty there, but we could not tie up for the night …”
They all looked at me. I was at first puzzled, then I understood. I was not, in those days, the ruthless old bugger who now writes these lines; that family had been kind to me and it seemed a small thing to accommodate them. I generously offered that, if they would put me and my crate and dunnage ashore in that beautiful city of Margate and buy me something hot and nice for supper, I would pay them the agreed passage-money in full and make my own way up-river to London Town in the morning. They all beamed at me, every one, and the Mama embraced me warmly and we all struck hands on the bargain.
Almost as soon as we had rounded the Foreland and were turning Margate’s Hook, the Margate itself appeared as a wondrous aurora of light which, as we drew in, resolved itself into a pearl-necklace of gas-lights: I had never seen anything so entrancing in my life, it seemed to be one of the fabled Cities of the Plain. Such a place was sure to be bursting with tasty dinners and young, sinful women: the sea-voyage, although short, had sharpened my appetite for both.
The father decided not to go ashore and, in lieu of the promised hot supper, gave me back thirty of my stivers, explaining that he preferred to take advantage of the fair wind to try to be off Harwich by dawn, because of the Margate dues and the lop of the sea. I think now that, speaking plainly, he did not want to have to buy costly suppers for the lads and their mother as well as me; also, I think that he may have fancied that on such a night there might well be coasters in difficulties who would be glad of his kindly assistance. When he and the lads had lumped my gear onto the jetty and had made their farewells and were busy about the work of the boat, the Mama gave me another of her big, succulent kisses; not, this time, of the motherly sort. I think I have already told you that in those days I was a fine-looking young fellow and still had both of my hands. (Indeed, even at my present advanced age, which I do not propose to divulge, some of my friends are kind enough to tell me that I could still easily find another pretty young wife and beget a son. But do not be afraid, my loving grandchildren and distant cousins: I have long ago realised that it is cheaper to buy rashers of bacon than to keep a pig – more hygienic, too. Indeed, who, in these dreadful days when good Englishmen are fighting brave Dutch Boers in Suid Afrika, would want to push more babies into the bellies of women?)
Chapter Three
Margate Jetty was bewildering and my carefully-learned English Language and Literature deserted me quite. As soon as I set foot upon it I was besieged by a throng of ribald porters competing for the lucrative privilege of carrying my light bags, although none of them seemed so concerned about my exceedingly heavy chest of Delft. Also, there were lodging-house ladies, touts for inns, genteel persons offering me the programmes of circulating libraries, bathing-women thrusting their cards into my pockets, fly-men importuning me in words quite incomprehensible and one saucy young – or almost young – woman who pretended to know me and shouted “Holloa! My young brockley-sprout, now then for the tizzy you owe me from last Easter?” The platform of the jetty was very low and the crowds on the shingly, gas-lit beach added to the uproar with more coarse comments upon me, my breeches, boots and general appearance until I was on the point of tears – or of punching some of them upon their noses.
At that moment there was a sort of eddy at the far end of the jetty and the crowd parted in a respectful way. A little round gentleman emerged, laying about him with his elbows until he had cleared a space around me.
“Vy, vot’s this,” he bellowed, “carn’t a poor foreign young chap pitch up on a British shore without being mocked and jostled? Leave him be, I say, and you two take his box to the shipping-shed.” With that he turned to me and lifted his huge white hat, bowing as well as his roundness would permit.
“John Jorrocks, M.F.H.,” he said. “Merchant of Great Coram Street.”
“Tea-grocer,” said someone in the crowd.
“I glories in the name of tea-grocer,” he retorted magnificently. “I imports none but the finest, both green and black, and has them earlier than anyone helse in the City.”
“My name is Carolus Van Cleef, Sir,” I said when he had finished, “and I am travelling to London to start a business selling Delftware.”
“Vy,” he cried, “ve’re practically in the same perfession: I sells the scandal-water and you sells the cups for the old tabbies to drink it from!” He seized my hand and shook my arm like the handle of a pump. “Come to the White Hart and share my ’umble repast, for the inner man tells me it’s supper time. You might as vell put up there, too; best beds in Margate and does you proud in the matter of wittles.” So saying, he linked arms with me and, having bidden two ragamuffins to carry my bags, marched me off to the inn. I studied him surreptitiously as we walked. He wore a rough-napped, unshorn-looking white hat, a blue coat with metal buttons, ample laps and outside pockets bulging like those of a Dutch burgomaster, a handsome buff kerseymere waistcoat and the tightest pair of dark-blue, stocking-net pantaloons you can imagine: they might have been painted onto his splendid thighs. The costume was completed by a pair of great Hessian boots with tassels, and a white tie around his neck with a gold pin in the form of the head of a fox – a most bizarre touch, it seemed to me.
“This is most kind of you, Mr, ah, Emmeffetch,” I said diffidently. He looked at me puzzledly, then roared with laughter, shaking and wheezing and slapping the splendid thighs.
“No, no,” he cried at last, “Jorrocks is the name, ‘M.F.H.’ is but the title, ‘the guinea stamp’ as Nimrod says. It is mere hinitials and means Master of Fox-hounds: the finest handle anyone could lay to his name. Fox ’unting, my dear young Sir, is my werry life: the himage of war with none of the guilt and only f
ive and twenty percent of the risk to life and limb. If ever I am wisited with the last infirmity of noble minds I fears it will be caused by my ungovernable passion for the chase.” He jingled the silver in his pockets moodily. I was greatly puzzled: his words seemed irrational but the other English seemed to hold him in deep respect. Clearly, I had much to learn. However, I was just old enough to know that I should hold my tongue: some people learn this too late, some never learn it. It was a good thing that I did not speak, for Mr Jorrocks had not done.
“When there’s neither hunting nor shooting going on,” he cried, waving his arms about in a prodigal fashion, “what’s a man to do with himself? I’m sure you’d despise me if I went fishing: the werry word’s a sickener.”
“Yes, perhaps,” I said, “but fish are good to eat, no?”
“You’re a most persuasive young cock!” he cried, slapping his great thigh again, “and I daresay that our host, Mr Creed, may have something of the sort fit for our supper. And, even as I says it, here we are!”
Mr Creed, the landlord of the White Hart, greeted my new friend in an obsequious way and promptly agreed to find me a room – it was, it seemed, merely a matter of turning two bagmen out. They could, he was sure, find lodgings more suitable to their purses and condition in a “flea-trap” further down the street, for he explained that they were but “glass-of-water-and-a-toothpick gents” who “fought every threepence on the bill”.
It was a snug room and the little maid who came to change the sheets whilst I was washing flirted her eyelashes at me in the most promising way. She seemed to be overworked and tired, but contrived to give the impression to me that she was not too tired. When I pinched her tight little bottom she smacked my face so gently that it was almost a caress. For the time being, however, my thoughts were on higher things. Supper, to be exact. When she had gone – after having promised to bring in a warming-pan as I retired – I concealed my store of gulden in various parts of the room, locked the door and made my way downstairs to the coffee-room where my excellent Mr Jorrocks awaited me. We were soon joined by a friend of his whom he addressed variously as “The Yorkshireman”, “Mr York”, “Mr Stubbs” and “Sir Tees”. I could make nothing of all this but I held my tongue for my Mama had often told me that the English were, to speak plainly, not quite like other men.
“Now then, my young cock,” cried Mr Jorrocks, clapping me on the shoulder (this is the mark of an Englishman: Prussians punch you in the ribs to show their friendship, Italians pinch you cruelly on the cheek), “now then!” he cried, “let’s see if a row of Dutch grinders can out-do a British set!”
I was hungry. I was also a Dutchman. Also, I had studied the English Language and Literature.
“Lay on, Macduff!” I cried, “and cursed be he that first cries ‘hold enough’.”
“A werry noble sentiment, worthy of Nimrod himself. Vy, I declares I could eat a helephant stuffed with grenadiers and wash them down with a hocean of malt liquor!”
We settled down at the table and squared our elbows. Mr Jorrocks had been boiling, on the coffee-room fire, an Imperial Quart and a half of Mr Creed’s stoutest draught port, with the orthodox proportion of lemon, cloves, sugar and cinnamon: it was perfection. The table was adorned with beautifully-dressed dishes of shrimps, lobsters, broiled bones, a cold knuckle of veal, an aitch-bone of beef, fried ham, a few grouses and some poached eggs. Having trifled with the shellfish a while to tickle our appetites – there was but one lobster each, although large – Mr Creed brought in a dish of Dover soles which vanished like the dew upon a rose. Now ready for a real gullet-tickler, I speared a grouse and called for a plate so that I might pass it to the good Jorrocks.
“No no, my young Sir,” he cried – but civilly – “Ve don’t do that here, alvays eat the farmer before the gentlemen.” Whereupon he drew the aitch-bone of beef towards him and helped me generously to the lovely, bloody slices encircled with marbled fat. Then we ate the grouses. Then we tried the fried ham with some poached eggs. Then Mr Jorrocks called for “three bottoms of brandy, hot, with” and we took the broiled bones in our fingers and gnawed happily.
Mr Jorrocks and the Yorkshireman seemed content but I wanted cheese. I asked diffidently for some of it, not being sure that the British used such things.
“Cheese?” cried Mr Jorrocks, “Cheese? Vy, wot a young Trojan you are, to be sure. Cheese you shall have, and in habundance. Mr Creed, I say Mr Creed, bring this young fighting-cock one of your Stiltons – the werry ripest, for he deserves no less!”
A strange thing, shaped like a bucket, was brought in and reverently placed upon the table. It stunk very nicely, not as rich as a Limberger but strong. There were little things burrowing busily in it but Mr Creed quietened them with a soup-ladle of hot port. No one else was hungry any more but I ate great store of it, spread upon strange biscuit-like things called Thick Captains. The others, I think, admired my appetite, for they applauded every mouthful. I do not think that they were making fun of me; they were kind, kind. Then we concocted a bowl of some hot drink of which I forget the name, which we drank, saying many a kind word one to another. Then we were given a chamber-candlestick apiece and made our ways upstairs to bed. Mr Jorrocks and Mr York, climbing the stairs ahead of me, seemed to be a little random in their choice of steps.
When I had stripped to my shirt and washed, the little maid came in with the promised warming-pan and spoke to me reproachfully.
“How late you are, Sir,” she said. “Some of you gentlemen have no consideration for a poor girl. Why, see, I’ve already changed into my night-shift, all fresh-washed, and am shivering with cold!”
“So you have, child,” I said compassionately, “and so you are. Come, let me warm you.”
“Oh Sir!” she cried a few moments later.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” she said, “You mistake me. I am not frightened. It is just that … well, have you been wounded? There, I mean?”
I thought for a moment. I realised.
“No my little love,” I murmured, “all of us, ah, Dutchmen are born like this.”
“Goodness gracious,” she said. “But, does it not make any difference?”
“Let us see,” I said.
Some twenty minutes later she was agreeing fervently that the difference, if any, was for the better. But women are notoriously feather-brained and she awoke me at least twice – I forget – in the night to reassure herself that my “novelty”, as she coyly described it, was as adept as she had seemed to remember. I contrived to reassure her, for in those days I was even younger than I now am.
From that day to this I have firmly believed in the properties of the excellent English Stilton Cheese: my table is never without it.
I was awakened in the dark before dawn by certain young persons scrambling out of my bed, giving me a sleepy kiss and fending-off my sleepy advances.
“It’s all right for some,” she cried, “who have nothing to do but take advantage of poor innocent girls and then slug a’bed half the day themselves!”
I made placatory noises, grasped her and danced her lovingly round the room while I ascertained with finger and toe that my various little stores of gulden, concealed here and there, were intact. They were. She, I need scarcely say, was not: a further three-minutes’ romp made sure of that, her protests making the interlude the more enjoyable. Before she left, frantic about the work she had to do, I gave her a whole gulden; I was young in those days and foolish.
Washed, dressed and shaven, I sought out Mr Jorrocks’s room – “you can tell it by ’is snoring,” said the other, uglier chamber-maid – and entered after a series of knocks, each one louder than the other.
“Come, my good friend!” I cried cheerily, “be stirring! Dawn is breaking!”
The shapeless lump under the bed-clothes wriggled in an irritable fashion.
“Let it break,” came the grumpy answer, “for it owes me nothing as I knows of.”
“But I had hoped, Mr Jorr
ocks, that you might join me at breakfast, as my guest, unless you are feeling, how is it, below the weather …?”
“Below the weather?” he bellowed, bounding out of bed with a thump which must have shaken the whole inn, “under the weather? Wot a imperent young game-cock you are, to be sure!” He smoothed out those parts of his ample nightshirt which had become entrapped in the folds of his person, his good temper quickly restoring itself. “No man shall say that John Jorrocks could not face his breakfast, come what may. Now, let me adwise you to take a restorative dip into Mother Hocean whilst I perform my ablutions and attend to my toilet. I shall look for you in the coffee-room in one hour precise, when we shall see who can eat most of that Macduff you spoke of so freely last night.”
Even at that hour the shingly shore of Margate was a heaving mass of bathing-women who came rushing towards me, avid for my patronage. I turned tail and fled. With one of the White Hart’s towels in my pocket I crossed to the Ramsgate side and found a stretch of deserted beach below the Preventive Service Station. I found that it was easier to swim in the sea than in the fresh water of the canals of my native land, but the water tasted curiously salt. A quick towelling and a brisk run brought me back to the White Hart at just the moment that Mr Jorrocks emerged from the inn’s kitchen, where he had been giving final directions for our breakfast. He rubbed his hands as he sat down. I, too, sat down, rubbing mine.
In the end I had to give him best. He had, after all, had a great deal more sleep than me and, you see, the appetite which my dips – one into Mother Hocean – had afforded me could not discount the healthy fatigue and strain upon the digestive organs.
All the Tea in China Page 3
