by A. J. Cronin
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
A. J. Cronin
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
A. J. Cronin
ASong of Sixpence
Born in Cardross, Scotland, A. J. Cronin studied at the University of Glasgow. In 1916 he served as a surgeon sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteers Reserve, and at the war’s end he completed his medical studies and practiced in South Wales. He was later appointed to the Ministry of Mines, studying the medical problems of the mining industry. He moved to London and built up a successful practice in the West End. In 1931 he published his first book, Hatter’s Castle, which was compared with the work of Dickens, Hardy and Balzac, winning him critical acclaim. Other books by A. J. Cronin include: The Stars Look Down, The Citadel, Three Loves, The Green Years, Beyond This Place, and The Keys of the Kingdom.
Chapter One
Every evening at six o’clock a sense of expectancy filled the house, brightening the long, vague and dreamy afternoon. As I went into the front room my mother, moving about the kitchen preparing our supper, began to sing. It was something about a miller’s daughter who lay down and died. She sang these sad Scottish songs in so lively a manner and with such natural cheerfulness they sounded gay. I stood on the hassock to look out of the window. Although I was to go to school next week I still had need of the hassock.
The road to the village station was empty except for Macintosh’s dog, asleep in the shade of the sycamore tree outside the smithy. Beyond the station with its beds of sweet william and yellow calceolarias lay the wide sweep of the deserted shore; and beyond that the Clyde estuary, enlivened at present by a white-funnelled paddle steamer, a Broomielaw boat, going downstream. Presently a figure appeared, not the expected one but still a friend—indeed my only friend, Maggie, or as she was called most unjustly by the ‘bad’ boys. Mad Maggie, a big awkward girl of thirteen who, festooned with milk cans from Snoddie’s farm, was now squeezing through the bars of the shut gates of the level crossing. This was a short cut so strictly forbidden me I watched reprovingly as she dragged up the road on the start of her evening milk round. Passing our house, one of four little villas primly in a row, she saw me at the window and, with a dull clank of cans, waved an arm in greeting.
I had begun to wave back when there came a shrill whistle. My eyes, diverted from Maggie, picked up a plume of steam beneath which a dark maroon serpent snaked slowly round the curve of the railway line. Painfully, as though out of breath, it puffed to the single platform. In the year 1900 only the slowest North British trains stopped at Ardencaple village.
As sometimes happened, my father was the only passenger to get off. He walked briskly, with the step of a man who likes to get home, an alert figure, conveying, even at that distance, an unmistakable and distinctive sense of style. He was wearing his brown suit, with dark brown shoes, a brown bowler hat with a curled brim, and a short fawn coat. As he drew near, the dog looked up and, being unaware of the prejudices of the village, raised the dust with its tail. Then I saw, with increased anticipation, that Father was carrying a parcel. Quite often when visiting customers in Winton he would bring home to mother and me something for supper that rarely failed to excite us: perhaps a bunch of choice Colmar grapes, or a cut of Tay salmon, or even a jar of Canton green ginger, exotics which seemed to indicate that Father was himself not averse to having good things to eat and which, of course, went so far beyond the modest standards of our daily life that, unveiling them casually with one eyebrow critically raised, he secretly enjoyed our startled looks.
The door clicked open and Mother, plucking off her apron, ran to meet and hug him, an action I did not altogether approve but which unfailingly took place. Father took off his coat and put it on a hanger—he was always careful of his clothes—then came into the kitchen, lifted me up in a detached manner and set me down again. Mother put the soup on the table. It was Scotch broth, a dish Father particularly liked but of which, unless pressed, I would eat only the peas, arranging them first in a circle on the rim of my plate. There was boiled beef to follow. Against the native custom—and this was only one of our many failures to conform to the strict usages of the community in which we lived—we took our main meal at night, since Father, on the move all day, seldom had the opportunity for more than a sandwich. Meanwhile, with an air that I felt to be unusual, even slightly strained, he was slowly unwrapping his parcel.
‘Well, Grace,’ he said. ‘It is all settled.’
Mother stopped ladling the broth. She had turned pale.
‘No, Conor!’
He looked at her with a smile, affectionate yet ironical, and touched up the ends of his short blond moustache.
‘I had the final meeting with Hagemann this afternoon. We’ve signed our agreement. He’s taking the boat back to Holland tonight.’
‘Oh, Con dear, you can’t mean it.’
‘See for yourself. There’s the first sample. Before your eyes.’
He placed a round glass container on the table, sat down calmly, took the soup plate from her unresistant hand and picked up his spoon. I thought that Mother, unbelievably, was going to cry. She sat down weakly. Dimly aware that something terrible, a crisis, had occurred, disturbing the peace of my home, I could not take my eyes off that round glass bottle. It contained a yellowish powder and had a printed label with a red, blue and white flag. With a great effort, Mother handed me my soup.
‘But, Conor,’ she said pleadingly. ‘ You’re doing so well with Murchison’s.’
‘You mean I have done well for them.’
‘Of course. At the same time, they are such sound people.’
‘I have nothing against Murchison’s, my dear Gracie, but I’m tired of wearing my boots out selling their flour. I’ve given them five good years of my life. Mind you, they’ve been fair with me. In fact old Murchison advised me to take the agency.’
‘But, Conor … we are so comfortable now … and so safe.’
Father raised that single eyebrow, but not on this occasion to present Colmar grapes. This mysterious bottle must surely be a bombshell.
‘We shall never get anywhere by remaining comfortable and safe. Now, do eat someth
ing like a good lass, and I’ll give you the details later.’ He leaned forward and patted her hand.
‘I’m too upset.’ Mother got up and placed the boiled beef on the table.
Unaware that I had not touched my broth, she removed my plate without scolding me. Father, with his invariable air of aplomb, carved the beef, calmly and elegantly. With his slight figure, his russet hair and warm complexion, his hazel eyes and even white teeth just showing beneath his curled moustache, he was a handsome man. I admired him intensely and was often spellbound by the unpredictable and daring audacities he would bring off without turning a hair. But in the full meaning of the word I did not love him. I belonged entirely to my mother. Soft, timid, kept back by a chain of illnesses that began with mumps and ended with diphtheria—I could still taste the carbolic glycerine Dr Duthie had used to paint my throat—and forced by the remarkable circumstances of our life into ties with Mother and my home that were especially close and emotional, I fully merited that deplorable epithet, a mother’s boy. Yet who would not have been with such a mother, at that time not more than twenty-four, rather short and soft in figure, with regular features, soft brown hair, eyes of a deep gentian blue, and in all her movements a kind of natural grace which, to my childish mind, seemed to explain her name. But above all, it was her look of sweetness that held me captive.
Now, with her chin cupped in her hand, she was listening to Father, who alone was doing justice to the beef.
‘You must admit,’ he was saying reasonably. ‘ The mustard, thank you dear … that I could not miss this chance. We are on the eve of a revolution in the baking industry. The old-fashioned barm method is on its way o-u-t, out.’ When Father wished to be impressive he would often spell a word before he said it.
‘But, Conor, the bread we get is perfectly good.’
Father, chewing with relish, shook his head.
‘You don’t know how often I’ve seen barm go sour. Bubbling out of the casks. And a whole batch of loaves completely spoiled. Ruined. After all, it’s only distiller’s scum. The new process will make cheaper and better bread. And it won’t go wrong. Think of the opportunity, Grace, with my established connections. Why, I know every baker in the West. I’ll be the first in the field. And working for myself.’
Mother was being persuaded.
‘You’re quite sure of Mr Hagemann?’
Father nodded with his mouth full.
‘He’s straight as a die. I can import from him in Rotterdam on most favourable terms. Besides, he’s advanced half the money to give me a start. Would he if he didn’t believe in me?’
A faint gleam of reassurance appeared in Mother’s eye succeeded by a remote look of expectancy. When supper was over she did not rise to clear the table. Nor did Father follow his usual habit of devoting half an hour to me—an elastic period often extended by my importunities—before I went to bed. Beyond the short stroll he occasionally took before retiring, Father never went out at night. After a long day spent in the society of men who were his friends he seemed perfectly content to be, as he put it, at his own fireside. Besides, there was no inducement for him to go out. Though he had bare acquaintances, he had never sought, let alone made, a friend in the village. Ardencaple was for him, indeed for all of us, a hostile camp.
Our evening communion was partly educational—it was he who had taught me my letters, and he would instruct me to read out, for our mutual benefit, recondite facts from his favourite compendium, Pears’ Cyclopaedia—but in the main, and especially since my illness, he had sought merely to entertain me. With an amazing fertility of imagination, he invented and related a whole series of fascinating adventures in which a young protagonist of precisely my age, small and rather delicate, but intrepid almost beyond belief, performed feats of outstanding bravery in tropic jungles or on desert islands amongst primitive tribes and man-eating savages, meanwhile interpolating from time to time side remarks to my mother which related usually to the natural appendages and accoutrements of the dark-skinned female members of the tribe and which, while I did not in the least understand their significance, made her laugh.
Tonight, however, as my parents continued to be absorbed in talk, I perceived that the prospect of my being regaled with a cannibal feast had faded and, meeting Father’s eye when he paused in what he was saying, I suddenly demanded, in the tones of one wronged and neglected:
‘What is in the bottle?’
He smiled with unusual benignancy.
‘It is yeast, Laurence. To be specific, Hagemann’s Royal Dutch Yeast.’
‘Yeast?’ I repeated, in bewilderment.
‘Just so.’ He nodded graciously. ‘A living substance composed of innumerable living cells. Yes, a form of life itself, one might say, an organism that grows, buds, turns starch into sugar, sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas, and so leavens our staff of life. Prepared,’ Father went on, in his best vein, ‘in mineral salt-sugar solution—as is my Royal Dutch Yeast—a modern technique far superior to the grain mash method, it offers a unique opportunity for introducing an entirely new process that will reorganize the Scottish baking industry.’
Father sounded as though he himself had discovered yeast and for long afterwards I believed he had. His exposition, obviously prepared, left me speechless. Mother, too, seemed to find it overpowering or at least quite enough, for me at present. She rose and, although the clock on the mantelpiece assured me it was well before my usual hour, suggested in a tone not to be disputed that I should go to bed.
This was ordinarily a lengthy process, prolonged by every pretext by which I sought to detain my mother, and complicated by all sorts of fetishes and rituals that I had built for my own protection and which, while unworthy of enumeration, may be imagined from my first action, which was to satisfy myself that a boa-constrictor was not concealed beneath my bed. Tonight, however, the advent of the yeast distracted me from all my ceremonies and shortened everything in a highly disagreeable manner.
Even when I was in bed and Mother had said good night, leaving my door ajar according to custom, this strange substance, mysterious invader of our home, kept fermenting in my mind. I could not get to sleep. As I lay with closed eyes I saw the yeast working in the flask, bubbling and frothing until it burst upwards in a swelling yellow cloud, overhanging our house, taking the form of the genie from the bottle in one of my father’s stories. I stirred uneasily. Was this the beginning of a dream of some strange vision of the future?
Although they spoke in low voices, the resumed conversation of my parents came in snatches through the unshut door of my narrow bedroom. From time to time I heard impressive and disturbing phrases: ‘away from this confounded village’ … ‘take up your music again’… ‘he would go to Rockcliff, like Terence’ … And finally just before I fell asleep I heard Father declare, in his most serious and decided tone:
‘You wait. Gracie, we’ll show your folks … and my lot too … that they can’t go on treating us like this. One day they’ll make it up to you. And soon.’
Chapter Two
For weeks I had longed to go to school, an adventure skilfully built up for me in the most glowing terms by my father, and deferred only by my susceptibility to the commonest germs. But now that the day had arrived, my state of mind verged on panic. As Mother put the finishing touches to me, buttoning up my new blue serge trousers and pulling down my jersey, I begged her with tears in my eyes not to send me. She laughed and kissed me.
‘You’ll be all right with Maggie. See, here’s year new satchel. Strap it on your shoulders like a real boy.’
The satchel, although empty, did help to brace me. I had begun to feel stronger when a knock at the door made me jump.
Maggie was there, standing on the doorstep, with her usual expression, humble and lowering, her tangled locks falling over eyes which had that dull yet appealing look seen in young Highland cattle. She was the daughter of the village washerwoman, a known slattern whose husband had long since made his escape from her abusiv
e tongue and who, while bewailing the lot of her deserted bairn, made a drudge of her. Dressed in an old cut-down tweed skirt my mother had given her, with a dam on the knee of one stocking, Maggie had few outward signs of grace. Self-acknowledged to be stupid, and with a heavy, depressed air that bespoke overwork and ill-usage at home, she was mercilessly teased with shouts of ‘Daft Maggie’ by the boys of the village, who nevertheless were wary of her, for she had a strong arm and a sure aim with a round pebble, gathered from the shore and always handy in her pocket. But to me she was both confidante and mentor. I truly trusted her, as did my mother, who liked Maggie and was good to her in many ways. Despite the numerous duties imposed upon her—and after school hours one rarely saw her without a bundle of laundry or her armour of milk cans which, after her round, she must scald and scour at the farm before her final task of feeding the hens—she had been during the long summer holidays a kind of nursemaid to me, taking me for walks in the afternoon during my periods of convalescence. Our favourite pilgrimage took us along the shore, passing on the way an isolated, sadly broken-down little cottage with a rotted green trellis, misnamed Rosebank, where, to my everlasting disgrace, it appeared that I had been born. How so momentous an event could have occurred in so deplorable an edifice I could not comprehend, yet presumably it had, for as we passed Rosebank, Maggie would launch into a fearsome yet compelling description, derived doubtless from her mother, of my arrival in this world on a dark and dreary Sabbath night when it had rained torrents and the tide had risen so high that my father, desperately seeking Dr Duthie with his little black bag, had almost failed to reach the village.
‘And to beat all,’ Maggie turned her commiserating gaze upon me, ‘ye came into the wurrld the wrong way round.’
‘The wrong way! But how, Maggie?’
‘Not head first. Feet first.’
‘Was that bad, Maggie?’ I demanded, petrified.
She nodded in sombre affirmation.
