But, after all, a partridge and a pheasant are only a bit bigger than a sparrow and a finch. And compared to a flea, a robin is big game. It is all a question of dimensions. Man is a hunter. ‘If the master wants to hunt, don’t you grunt; let him hunt!’
Return to Bestwood (1926)
I came home to the Midlands for a few days, at the end of September. Not that there is any home, for my parents are dead. But there are my sisters, and the district one calls home; that mining district between Nottingham and Derby.
It always depresses me to come to my native district. Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in Canal Street, New Orleans, or in the Avenue Madero, in Mexico City, or in George Street, Sydney, in Trincomallee Street, Kandy, or in Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion. Partly I want to get back to the place as it was when I was a boy, and I waited so long to be served in the Co-op I remember our Co-op number, 1553A.L., better than the date of my birth – and when I came out hugging a string net of groceries. There was a little hedge across the road from the Co-op then, and I used to pick the green buds which we called bread-and-cheese. And there were no houses in Gabes Lane. And at the corner of Queen Street, Butcher Bob was huge and fat and taciturn.
Butcher Bob is long dead, and the place is all built up. I am never quite sure where I am, in Nottingham Road. Walker Street is not very much changed, though, because the ash tree was cut down when I was sixteen, when I was ill. The houses are still only on one side the street, the fields on the other. And still one looks across at the amphitheatre of hills which I still find beautiful, though there are new patches of reddish houses, and a darkening of smoke. Crich is still on the sky line to the west, and the woods of Annesley to the north, and Coney Grey Farm still lies in front. And there is still a certain glamour about the country-side. Curiously enough, the more motor-cars and tram-cars and omnibuses there are rampaging down the roads, the more the country retreats into its own isolation, and becomes more mysteriously inaccessible.
When I was a boy, the whole population lived very much more with the country. Now, they rush and tear along the roads, and have joy-rides and outings, but they never seem to touch the reality of the country-side. There are many more people, for one thing: and all these new contrivances, for another.
The country seems, somehow, fogged over with people, and yet not really touched. It seems to lie back, away, unreached and asleep. The roads are hard and metalled and worn with everlasting rush. The very field-paths seem wider and more trodden and squalid. Wherever you go, there is the sordid sense of humanity.
And yet the fields and the woods in between the roads and paths sleep as in a heavy, weary dream, disconnected from the modern world.
This visit, this September, depresses me peculiarly. The weather is soft and mild, mildly sunny in that hazed, dazed, uncanny sunless sunniness which makes the Midlands peculiarly fearsome to me. I cannot, cannot accept as sunshine this thin luminous vaporousness which passes as a fine day in the place of my birth. Oh Phœbus Apollo! Surely you have turned your face aside!
But the special depression this time is the great coal strike, still going on. In house after house, the families are now living on bread and margarine and potatoes. The colliers get up before dawn, and are away into the last recesses of the country-side, scouring the country for blackberries, as if there were a famine. But they will sell the blackberries at fourpence a pound, and so they’ll be fourpence in pocket.
But when I was a boy, it was utterly infra dig. for a miner to be picking blackberries. He would never have demeaned himself to such an unmanly occupation. And as to walking home with a little basket – he would almost rather have committed murder. The children might do it, or the women, or even the half grown youths. But a married, manly collier!
But nowadays, their pride is in their pocket, and the pocket has a hole in it.
It is another world. There are policemen everywhere, great big strange policemen with faces like a leg of mutton. Where they come from, heaven only knows: Ireland or Scotland, presumably, for they are no Englishmen. And they exist, along the country-side, in thousands. The people call them ‘blue-bottles,’ and ‘meat-flies.’ And you can hear a woman call across the street to another: ‘Seen any blow-flies about?’ – Then they turn to look at the alien policemen, and laugh shrilly.
And this in my native place! Truly, one no longer knows the palm of his own hand. When I was a boy, we had our own police sergeant, and two young constables. And the women would as leave have thought of calling Sergeant Mellor a ‘blue-bottle’ as calling Queen Victoria one. The Sergeant was a quiet, patient man, who spent his life trying to keep people out of trouble. He was another sort of shepherd, and the miners and their children were a flock to him. The women had the utmost respect for him.
But the women seem to have changed most in this, that they have no respect for anything. There was a scene in the market-place yesterday, a Mrs Hufton and a Mrs Rowley being taken off to court to be tried for insulting and obstructing the police. The police had been escorting the black-legs from the mines, after a so-called day’s work, and the women had made the usual row. They were two women from decent homes. In the past they would have died of shame, at having to go to court. But now, not at all.
They had a little gang of women with them in the market-place, waving red flags and laughing loudly and using occasional bad language. There was one, the decent wife of the post-man. I had known her and played with her as a girl. But she was waving her red flag, and cheering as the motor-bus rolled up.
The two culprits got up, hilariously, into the bus.
‘Good luck, old girl! Let ’em have it! Give it the blue-bottles in the neck! Tell ’em what for! Three cheers for Bestwood! Strike while the iron’s hot, girls!’
‘So long! So long, girls! See you soon! Merry home coming, what, eh?’
‘Have a good time, now! Have a good time! Stick a pin in their fat backsides, if you can’t move ’em any other road. We s’ll be thinking of you!’
‘So long! So long! See you soon! Who says Walker!’
‘E-eh! E-eh!’
The bus rolled heavily off, with the shouting women, amid the strange hoarse cheering of the women in the little market-place. The draughty little market-place where my mother shopped on Friday evenings, in her rusty little black bonnet, and where now a group of decent women waved little red flags and hoarsely cheered two women going to court!
O mamma mia! – as the Italians say. My dear mother, your little black bonnet would fly off your head in horrified astonishment, if you saw it now. You were so keen on progress: a decent working man, and a good wage! You paid my father’s union pay for him, for so many years! You believed so firmly in the Co-op! You were at your Women’s Guild when they brought you word your father, the old tyrannus, was dead! At the same time, you believed so absolutely in the ultimate benevolence of all the masters, of all the upper classes. One had to be grateful to them, after all!
Grateful! You can have your cake and eat it, while the cake lasts. When the cake comes to an end, you can hand on your indigestion. Oh my dear and virtuous mother, who believed in a Utopia of goodness, so that your own people were never quite good enough for you – not even the spoiled delicate boy, myself! – oh my dear and virtuous mother, behold the indigestion we have inherited, from the cake of perfect goodness you baked too often! Nothing was good enough! We must all rise into the upper classes! Upper! Upper! Upper!
Till at last the boots are all uppers, the sole is worn out, and we yell as we walk on stones.
My dear, dear mother, you were so tragic, because you had nothing to be tragic about! We, on the other side, having a moral and social indigestion that would raise the wind for a thousand explosive tragedies, let off a mild crepitus ventris and shout: Ha
ve a good time, old girl! Enjoy yourself, old lass!
Nevertheless, we have all of us ‘got on.’ The reward of goodness, in my mother’s far-off days, less than twenty years ago, was that you should ‘get on.’ Be good, and you’ll get on in life.
Myself, a snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, I call myself at home when I sit in a heavy old Cinquecento Italian villa, of which I rent only half, even then – surely I can be considered to have ‘got on.’ When I wrote my first book, and it was going to be published – sixteen years ago – and my mother was dying, a fairly well-known editor wrote to my mother and said, of me: ‘By the time he is forty, he will be riding in his carriage.’
To which my mother is supposed to have said, sighing, ‘Ay, if he lives to be forty!’
Well, I am forty-one, so there’s one in the eye for that sighing remark. I was always weak in health, but my life was strong. Why had they all made up their minds that I was to die? Perhaps they thought I was too good to live. Well, in that case they were had!
And when I was forty, I was not even in my own motor-car. But I did drive my own two horses in a light buggy (my own) on a little ranch (also my own, or my wife’s, through me) away on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. And sitting in my corduroy trousers and blue shirt, calling: ‘Get up Aaron! Ambrose!’ then I thought of Justin Harrison’s prophecy. Oh Oracle of Delphos! Oracle of Dodona! ‘Get up, Ambrose!’ Bump! went the buggy over a rock, and the pine-needles slashed my face! See him driving in his carriage, at forty! – driving it pretty badly too! Put the brake on!
So I suppose I’ve got on, snotty-nosed little collier’s lad, of whom most of the women said: ‘He’s a nice little lad!’ They don’t say it now: if ever they say anything, which is doubtful. They’ve forgotten me entirely.
But my sister’s ‘getting on’ is much more concrete than mine. She is almost on the spot. Within six miles of that end dwelling in The Breach, which is the house I first remember – an end house of hideous rows of miners’ dwellings, though I loved it, too – stands my sister’s new house, ‘a lovely house!’ – and her garden: ‘I wish mother could see my garden in June!’
And if my mother did see it, what then? It is wonderful the flowers that bloom in these Midlands, in June. A northern Persephone seems to steal out from the Plutonic, coal-mining depths and give a real hoot of blossoms. But if my mother did return from the dead, and see that garden in full bloom, and the glass doors open from the hall of the new house, what then? Would she then say: It is reached! Consummatum est!
When Jesus gave up the ghost, he cried: It is finished. Consummatum est! But was it? And if so, what? What was it that was consummate?
Likewise, before the war, in Germany I used to see advertised in the newspapers a moustache-lifter, which you tied on at night and it would make your moustache stay turned up, like the immortal moustache of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose moustache alone is immortal. This moustache-lifter was called: Es ist erreicht! In other words: It is reached! Consummatum est!
Was it? Was it reached? With the moustache-lifter?
So the ghost of my mother, in my sister’s garden. I see it each time I am there, bending over the violas, or looking up at the almond tree. Actually an almond tree! And I always ask, of the grey-haired, good little ghost: ‘Well what of it, my dear? What is the verdict?’
But she never answers, though I press her:
‘Do look at the house, my dear! Do look at the tiled hall, and the rug from Mexico, and the brass from Venice, seen through the open doors, beyond the lilies and the carnations of the lawn beds! Do look! And do look at me, and see if I’m not a gentleman! Do say that I’m almost upper class!’
But the dear little ghost says never a word.
‘Do say we’ve got on! Do say we’ve arrived. Do say it is reached, es ist erreicht, consummatum est!’
But the little ghost turns aside, she knows I am teasing her. She gives me one look, which is a look I know, and which says: ‘I shan’t tell you, so you can’t laugh at me. You must find out for yourself.’ And she steals away, to her place, wherever it may be. – ‘In my father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you.’
The black-slate roofs beyond the wind-worn young trees at the end of the garden are the same thick layers of black roofs of blackened brick houses, as ever. There is the same smell of sulphur from the burning pit bank. Smuts fly on the white violas. There is a harsh sound of machinery. Persephone couldn’t quite get out of hell, so she let Spring fall from her lap along the upper workings.
But no! There are no smuts, there is even no smell of the burning pit bank. They cut the bank, and the pits are not working. The strike has been going on for months. It is September, but there are lots of roses on the lawn beds.
‘Where shall we go this afternoon? Shall we go to Hardwick?’
Let us go to Hardwick. I have not been for twenty years. Let us go to Hardwick:
Hardwick Hall
More window than wall.
Built in the days of good Queen Bess, by that other Bess, termagant and tartar, Countess of Shrewsbury.
Butterley, Alfreton, Tibshelf – what was once the Hardwick district is now the Notts-Derby coal area. The country is the same, but scarred and splashed all over with mines and mining settlements. Great houses loom from hill-brows, old villages are smothered in rows of miners’ dwellings, Bolsover Castle rises from the mass of the colliery village of Bolsover. – Böwser, we called it, when I was a boy.
Hardwick is shut. On the gates, near the old inn, where the atmosphere of the old world lingers perfect, is a notice: ‘This park is closed to the public and to all traffic until further notice. No admittance.’
Of course! The strike! They are afraid of vandalism.
Where shall we go? Back into Derbyshire, or to Sherwood Forest.
Turn the car. We’ll go on through Chesterfield. If I can’t ride in my own carriage, I can still ride in my sister’s motor-car.
It is a still September afternoon. By the ponds in the old park, we see colliers slowly loafing, fishing, poaching in spite of all notices.
And at every lane end there is a bunch of three or four policemen, ‘blue-bottles,’ big, big-faced, stranger policemen. Every field path, every stile seems to be guarded. There are great pits, coal mines, in the fields. And at the end of the paths coming out of the field from the colliery, along the high-road, the colliers are squatted on their heels, on the wayside grass, silent and watchful. Their faces are clean, white, and all the months of the strike have given them no colour and no tan. They are pit-bleached. They squat in silent remoteness, as if in the upper galleries of hell. And the policemen, alien, stand in a group near the stile. Each lot pretends not to be aware of the others.
It is past three. Down the path from the pit come straggling what my little nephew calls ‘the dirty ones.’ They are the men who have broken strike, and gone back to work. They are not many: their faces are black, they are in their pit-dirt. They linger till they have collected, a group of a dozen or so ‘dirty ones,’ near the stile, then they trail off down the road, the policemen, the alien ‘blue-bottles,’ escorting them. And the ‘clean ones,’ the colliers still on strike, squat by the wayside and watch without looking. They say nothing. They neither laugh nor stare. But here they are, a picket, and with their bleached faces they see without looking, and they register with the silence of doom, squatted down in rows by the road-side.
The ‘dirty ones’ straggle off in the lurching, almost slinking walk of colliers, swinging their heavy feet and going as if the mine-roof were still over their heads. The big blue policemen follow at a little distance. No voice is raised: nobody seems aware of anybody else. But there is the silent, hellish registering in the consciousness of all three groups, clean ones, dirty ones and blue-bottles.
So it is now all the way into Chesterfield, whose crooked spire lies below. The men who have gone back to work – they seem few, indeed – are lurching and slinking in quiet groups, hom
e down the high-road, the police at their heels. And the pickets, with bleached faces, squat and lean and stand, in silent groups, with a certain pale fatality, like Hell, upon them.
And I, who remember the homeward-trooping of the colliers when I was a boy, the ringing of the feet, the red mouths and the quick whites of the eyes, the swinging pit bottles, and the strange voices of men from the underworld calling back and forth, strong and, it seemed to me, gay with the queer, absolved gaiety of miners – I shiver, and feel I turn into a ghost myself. The colliers were noisy, lively, with strong underworld voices such as I have never heard in any other men, when I was a boy. And after all, it is not so long ago. I am only forty-one.
But after the war, the colliers went silent: after 1920. Till 1920 there was a strange power of life in them, something wild and urgent, that one could hear in their voices. They were always excited, in the afternoon, to come up above-ground: and excited, in the morning, at going down. And they called in the darkness with strong, strangely evocative voices. And at the little local foot-ball matches, on the damp, dusky Saturday afternoons of winter, great, full-throated cries came howling from the foot-ball field, in the zest and the wildness of life.
But now, the miners go by to the foot-ball match in silence like ghosts, and from the field comes a poor, ragged shouting. These are the men of my own generation, who went to the board school with me. And they are almost voiceless. They go to the welfare clubs, and drink with a sort of hopelessness.
Life with a Capital L Page 30
