Hudley and my family were the point of defeat, the original large red lion, for me; until I conquered there I conquered nowhere.
3
“Why are all those men standing outside that building?” I said idly to John as the taxi drove along the Hudley main street.
“That’s the Labour Exchange.”
“But what are they waiting for?” I persisted, puzzled.
“Look, Chris,” said John in a tone of exasperation: “Now you’re in the West Riding, for heaven’s sake have some sense. Don’t go about asking silly questions. Use your eyes and read the newspapers—you’ll learn soon enough. Things are very far from grand here, let me tell you. We’re having a bit of a slump, you may have heard.”
I asked no more questions, and maintained a silence as grim as his own until we had drawn up at the gate of Ashroyd and were walking up the sloping path side by side. My spirits sank at the sight of the familiar path and steps, the lace-curtained windows and the yellow glass knob on the door. The house badly needed a coat of paint, I thought. Looking over its whole façade to check that impression, I saw that the blinds in the front bedroom were partly lowered.
“But how is father really?” I exclaimed.
“As a matter of fact you’re going to get a bit of a shock when you see him, Chris,” said John. “But he’s all right, you know; he’s coming round.”
A moment later I stood at my father’s bedside. He was lying flat, hardly visible among his pillows, with closed eyes. John pulled up a blind and the cold rainy afternoon light struck across the room; my father frowned and turned his head aside. He looked small and shrivelled; his once crisp flaming hair was dim and untidy, the crumpled collar of his old-fashioned striped flannel nightdress revealed his thin lined neck. His eyelids appeared white and defenceless without their sheltering glasses. A sudden rush of pitying love for this weak and helpless being filled my heart. One of his bony hands lay outside the coverlet; I covered it with my own; he clasped it feebly in his fingers but did not open his eyes.
“Here’s Chris come to see you, father,” said John loudly.
My father’s eyes flew open and he stared at me.
“Well, now then!” he said in a thin high tone but with evident pleasure. “Chris, eh?” Then his look changed from welcome to anxiety, and he slightly shook his head. “We’re having a bad do at Hilbert, Chris,” he said.
“Never mind, father,” said I soothingly. “John will pull it round.”
My father gave a weak but derisive snort.
“Have you come to stay with me for a bit, then, Chris?” he said.
His voice had that peculiar West Riding intonation which is rough because its owner does not wish to appear to plead, and I was moved. I answered:
“Yes.”
“Just till I get on my feet again, eh?”
“Yes.”
In the event I remained with him five years.
It was a protracted ordeal. He was slowly slipping down the incline towards death, but his excellent constitution, his great spirit and his natural tenacity made this a long process, with many pauses by the way, so that he experienced frequent alternations of hope and disappointment, very painful to share. He soon recovered, as far as recovery was possible, from this first attack, and in outward appearance looked much as before, though a trifle thinner. But his strength was variable; he could sometimes do the most unlikely things with ease— especially when those in charge of him had tried to veto them —and at other times could hardly perform the simplest service for himself. This was profoundly troubling for him, and perplexing for those about him, whose decisions were always being made to appear wrong.
Sometimes, for example, during our first few months together, my father would insist on going to the mill, and appear so well that it seemed a mistake to try to prevent it, only to be brought home in John’s car an hour later, looking utterly exhausted.
“Can’t you keep him at home, Chris?” said John crossly on these occasions. “There’s nothing for him to do at Hilbert —he only goes looking round and finding out things he’d much better not know.”
It was right, I felt, that in his herculean efforts to avoid economic catastrophe, John should be left as unhampered as possible; on the other hand, when my father burst into my room beaming, to say he was just going down to Hilbert for an hour, there was a point beyond which dissuasion seemed cruel; moreover, if I did not take him in my car, he was capable of walking off alone. Sometimes, too, old customers, not realizing his state of health, would ask to see him on some point or other, or manufacturing friends would ask for his advice, or our finishers, blamed for a damaged piece of cloth, would grumble that if old Mr. Jarmayne saw it he’d take a different view. Then John, who liked to give him pleasure when it was compatible with business, would arrange an appointment for him, and I would arrange to drive him there. But on such days I had to abandon all hope of doing any work. He rose earlier than usual, and finding time heavy on his hands, would burst into my room two or three times, excitedly enquiring whether proper arrangements for our excursion together had been made. Sometimes this preliminary excitement was too much for him, and at the last moment he would cry off the appointment; once we were halfway there when he announced mournfully that I must turn round and go home. Sometimes when we arrived, he declined to get out of the car and sent me in to take his place; the interview I have previously recorded, between my old schoolfellow Atkinson and myself, took place on one of these occasions.
At the end of the first three months, however, he was ill again. He had seemed so much better lately that I had begun to entertain hopes of returning to London. His illness postponed any such return, and when at last he came downstairs again, he appeared so frail, his clothes hung on him so loosely, his shoulders were so bent, his face so haggard, his blue eyes so dim, that my heart sank, for he was clearly not fit to be left alone. I congratulated him on his convalescence. My father snorted, and after a moment observed:
“I suppose now I’m better you’ll be off back to London, eh?”
I perceived that my previous hopes of return had been visible to him, and might even have caused his attack. I sighed.
“Would you like me to stay with you, father?”
“How do you mean, stay?”
“Give up my flat and live here with you.”
“Of course I should like you to stay!” exclaimed my father in a belligerent tone. “What nonsense you talk, Chris! As if you didn’t know! But could you earn your living from here, eh?”
“I can earn it anywhere nowadays.”
“Well then!” said my father crossly.
I gave up my flat and settled down at Ashroyd. My uncle Alfred was now living with John and Edie, and his housekeeper, a faithful old retainer who had served the Ashworth Jarmaynes in many capacities for many years, was persuaded by Edie to come and look after us. She gave us splendid service, and though she and my father quarrelled heartily at times, she humoured his foibles as no-one else could. But there were some services he would not allow her to render. Proud and prudish, he could not bear a woman to dress or undress him; he required a son for this purpose. If I could not be present, he insisted on the attendance of John. John thought this an unnecessary fuss, but came punctiliously enough; the trouble was that on these occasions they always fell to discussing textiles and thence into a vehement quarrel, when my father expressed strong distrust and disapproval of the way John was managing the mill, and threatened to come down to Hilbert next day and take the reins into his own hands. So that whenever I returned home from a brief stay in London for professional affairs, or from a rare visit to the theatre, John always greeted me gloomily with: “He’s been on about those reins again.” At first I feared my father might really burst into Hilbert Mills and make a scene on these lines, but after his second illness he never again demanded to be taken there; he evidently realized that his strength was inadequate to the effort.
Occasionally, however, while Mrs. Womersley was bus
y upstairs and I was working, he would suddenly put on his hat and coat and go tottering off down Walker Lane.
“He’s off again, Mr. Chris,” said Mrs. Womersley, putting her head round my door.
As he was not fit to be out alone in traffic, I had to leave my work and go out in search of him at once. It is vexing to be broken off in the middle of a paragraph, and I was not always as agreeable as I should have been when I found him. One morning after what my father’s grandchildren now jokingly called a rein night, he disappeared in this way. I sought him in all his ordinary Walker Lane haunts—there were several small shops where he liked to call; I would find him sitting on a high chair beside the counter discussing the price of carrots or buying an unwanted pound of mixed biscuits, for the shopkeepers were kind to him. He was not in any of these, however, and had not been seen in their neighbourhood; a shower had begun to fall and I felt genuinely anxious about him, as well as experiencing the irritated sense of responsibility natural to these occasions. I returned to Ashroyd but he was not there; I telephoned Hilbert Mills to see if he had at last acted on his threat, but he was not there. John shared my alarm; he sent out a couple of office staff to search and himself drove slowly along the route which my father might have taken, scanning vehicles and interrogating conductors at bus-stops. Mrs. Womersley and I meanwhile ran up and down Walker Lane, enlisting the help of passers-by. After almost an hour of this vain search I decided to inform the police, and was hurrying up the Ashroyd path in order to telephone when I heard a knocking on the next door window. A pleasant young couple with small children now inhabited the Darrells’ house, and it was the wife who knocked and beckoned. I turned to her door, where she met me.
“Oh, Mr. Chris, are you looking for Mr. Jarmayne? He’s here!” she cried.
Sure enough my father sat very comfortably by the fire in the front room, with an empty cup beside him.
“He couldn’t remember who lived in this house and came in to ask, so I persuaded him to have a cup of coffee.”
“It was very kind of you,” said I stiffly. “It’s a pity you didn’t tell us where you were going, father—half the town’s out looking for you and I was just about to inform the police.”
My father snorted.
“We mustn’t take up any more of your time,” said I to our hostess, speaking politely with an effort—the thought of John’s comments on the affair vexed me. “Come along, father.”
“Don’t scold him, Mr. Chris,” said the young wife. “We’re always very glad to have him here, you know. Would you like to take him out the back way, so he won’t have the path to climb?”
I accepted this courtesy and we moved slowly out of the house, my father hanging on my arm as usual. As soon as we were out of earshot he turned on me hotly.
“You’ve no need to look so glum, Chris—I’m not a child and I won’t be treated like one. I shall go where I please.”
“How do you expect me to look, father, when you’ve worried us all into fits and ruined my morning’s work?” I countered. All the same, I thought, trying to practise my habit of translation: as a child how I hated not being able to go out without his permission! He must hate having to demand mine. On a sudden impulse I went on: “I’m your son, you know; I can’t be a saint any more than you can.”
My father opened his blue eyes wide and gazed at me in astonishment. After a moment, however, this expression became mingled with a kind of glee. He said no more, did not loiter on the way home, received Mrs. Womersley’s expostulations with dignity, and altogether behaved very meekly for the rest of the day. And in the evening, as we sat together, he began suddenly to pour out to me the story of his original quarrel with his own father, which I have recounted in an earlier chapter.
“He was a fiery, vehement sort of a man,” he said. “And I expect I was the same, you see. Like you said this morning, Chris.”
“I expect you were, father,” said I sardonically.
My father laughed.
“I was fond of him all the same,” he said. “I was jealous of his affection for his second family of children, you know— Alfred and that lot. And I expect I said things I shouldn’t. Yes, I expect I did.”
“What did you say, father?” I asked curiously.
“Oh, I said they were spoiled and extravagant,” admitted my father. “And so they were, Chris! So they were. There was a watch-chain your uncle Alfred had—a pound a link, it cost. ...”
This was the first of a long series of reminiscences by my father, in the swirling course of which dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean (to quote Hardy) sometimes raised their heads and were swept away down the current of time. My mother—her great beauty, her wild, reckless, drinking family, my father’s passion for her and sin with her—thus emerged; “for after all you’re a man now, Chris, you understand these things.” The tragedy of poor Henrietta, plain, anaemic, doomed to an early death, came out too: “If I’d married her, now! But somehow I never could abide the thought of her in that way. I thought at one time you were going to be like Henrietta, you know, Chris. You had a look of her, as a child. But when you’re angry you’ve got a look of your mother too.” Stories of financial ruin and triumph, awful records of family hatreds and unnatural loves, swindles in family businesses, tricks about family wills, musical intrigues and disappointments when my father and Mr. Hodgson sang duets together, absurd but powerful sentimentalities—“This house was always just a bit more than I could afford, Chris, but I liked its name, you see, it reminded me of my real home in Ashworth”—all these flowed out, mingled with fascinating details of the manners and customs of the nineteenth century, that period which now seemed so fabulously prosperous to the depressed textile trade. My chance remark about our biological similarity of disposition—though it was not really chance, but the fruit of my whole intellectual and moral struggle—had convinced my father that there was sympathy between us, and accordingly he poured out to me his whole experience: more than seventy years of West Riding life.
Perhaps in other circumstances these tales would not have made so deep an impression. Even as it was, sometimes these sessions of recollection were tedious. My father, who rose late, liked to sit up late and sometimes, when his anecdotes were trivial or repetitive, his droning talk seemed quite interminable; I longed to escape for a drink, a quiet read, a lonely walk; only affection or duty (I was never quite sure which and perhaps in this case they were the same thing) kept me there listening to him. But usually I listened enthralled and even amidst the tedium found items of significance, for at that time everything about the West Riding enthralled me, because the West Riding was in agony and I grieved for its agony with all my heart.
The history of the West Riding during the post-war slump has often been related, both by pens abler than mine and by my own. I will record here only those details of the long-drawn-out ordeal which struck most strongly and painfully on my feelings and thus influenced me most.
On the workers’ side there was the protracted, seemingly endless, agony of unemployment; the long, long queues at the employment exchanges revealed the dreadful fact that one-third of the whole adult population of Hudley was then drawing unemployment insurance pay—or, as the harsh phrase of the day had it, was “on the dole.” There was the hated humiliation of the means test, which provided that if one member of a family at long last secured a job, the unemployment benefit of the father at once went down, so that the circumstances of the family were not in the least improved. Men rotted at the street corners, physically from lack of sufficient food, mentally as skill decayed and hope perished.
But on the managerial side too my sympathies were deeply engaged. There were bankruptcies, there were suicides, there were nervous breakdowns, there were collapses like my father’s, among those of middle age; there were breakings of young lives, lads and girls recalled from universities or training on which they had set their heart, marriages postponed. Worse than all these, perhaps, were the nerve-racking struggles to avoid these
disasters, which preceded them. Independent, stiff-necked, stubborn West Riding folk—like my uncle Alfred, for instance—had to bow their heads and ask help from relatives: the greatest humiliation which can befall any northerner. Manufacturers went to interviews with their bank managers as if entering a torture chamber; it became a grimly familiar joke to praise these interviews for keeping the weight down—their agony was so intense that the victim sweated heavily. Now for the first time in my life I heard Yorkshire people speaking openly, not of their “brass”—they had done that, a good deal too often in some people’s view, before—but of their lack of it; financial stringency which would previously have been concealed by every possible means, was now sardonically joked about wherever the middle class met.
Indeed during this period the whole industrial north— wage-earner, millowner, and all their dependants—lived in a state of continual uncertainty, anxiety and nervous tension. It was not to be wondered at that under such conditions the young people snatched feverishly at every possible enjoyment in order to relieve the strain by forgetting for a moment the threat under which they lived; let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow father is going bankrupt or losing his job, became the universal motto. Anne, John’s youngest girl, said cheerfully to me one day: “I’m ready to give up everything but pleasure.” This remark, utterly incomprehensible to a Victorian like my father (who puzzled over it for weeks), was greeted with a chorus of laughing agreement by her contemporaries.
These sufferings, observed day by day and fused night by night with my father’s recollections, aroused in me a passionate sympathy for the West Riding in its trouble, a passionate desire to explain it to itself, to make it aware of its own best and worst qualities, to implore it to take a reasonable course.
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