The trouble over Joe aged Father a great deal. To lose Joe was merely to cut a loss, but it hurt him and made him ashamed. From that time forward his moustache was much greyer and he seemed to have grown a lot smaller. Perhaps my memory of him as a little grey man, with a round, lined, anxious face and dusty spectacles, really dates from that time. By slow degrees he was getting more and more involved in money worries and less and less interested in other things. He talked less about politics and the Sunday papers, and more about the badness of trade. Mother seemed to have shrunk a little, too. In my childhood I’d known her as something vast and overflowing, with her yellow hair and her beaming face and her enormous bosom, a sort of great opulent creature like the figure-head of a battleship. Now she’d got smaller and more anxious and older than her years. She was less lordly in the kitchen, went in more for neck of mutton, worried over the price of coal, and began to use margarine, a thing which in the old days she’d never have allowed into the house. After Joe had gone Father had to hire an errand boy again, but from then on he employed very young boys whom he only kept for a year or two and who couldn’t lift heavy weights. I sometimes lent him a hand when I was at home. I was too selfish to do it regularly. I can still see him working his way slowly across the yard, bent double and almost hidden under an enormous sack, like a snail under its shell. The huge, monstrous sack, weighing a hundred and fifty pounds, I suppose, pressing his neck and shoulders almost to the ground, and the anxious, spectacled face looking up from underneath it. In 1911 he ruptured himself and had to spend weeks in hospital and hire a temporary manager for the shop, which ate another hole in his capital. A small shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch, but it isn’t sudden and obvious like the fate of a working man who gets the sack and promptly finds himself on the dole. It’s just a gradual chipping away of trade, with little ups and downs, a few shillings to the bad here, a few sixpences to the good there. Somebody who’s dealt with you for years suddenly deserts and goes to Sarazins’. Somebody else buys a dozen hens and gives you a weekly order for corn. You can still keep going. You’re still ‘your own master’, always a little more worried and a little shabbier, with your capital shrinking all the time. You can go on like that for years, for a lifetime if you’re lucky. Uncle Ezekiel died in 1911, leaving £120 which must have made a lot of difference to Father. It wasn’t till 1913 that he had to mortgage his life-insurance policy. That I didn’t hear about at the time, or I’d have understood what it meant. As it was I don’t think I ever got further than realizing that Father ‘wasn’t doing well’, trade was ‘slack’, there’d be a bit longer to wait before I had the money to ‘set up’. Like Father himself, I looked on the shop as something permanent, and I was a bit inclined to be angry with him for not managing things better. I wasn’t capable of seeing, and neither was he nor anyone else, that he was being slowly ruined, that his business would never pick up again and if he lived to be seventy he’d certainly end in the workhouse. Many a time I’ve passed Sarazins’ shop in the market-place and merely thought how much I preferred their slick window-front to Father’s dusty old shop, with the ‘S. Bowling’ which you could hardly read, the chipped white lettering, and the faded packets of bird-seed. It didn’t occur to me that Sarazins’ were tapeworms who were eating him alive. Sometimes I used to repeat to him some of the stuff I’d been reading in my correspondence-course textbooks, about salesmanship and modern methods. He never paid much attention. He’d inherited an old-established business, he’d always worked hard, done a fair trade, and supplied sound goods, and things would look up presently. It’s a fact that very few shopkeepers in those days actually ended in the workhouse. With any luck you died with a few pounds still your own. It was a race between death and bankruptcy, and, thank God, death got Father first, and Mother too.
1911, 1912, 1913. I tell you it was a good time to be alive. It was late in 1912, through the vicar’s Reading Circle, that I first met Elsie Waters. Till then, although, like all the rest of the boys in the town, I’d gone out looking for girls and occasionally managed to connect up with this girl or that and ‘walk out’ a few Sunday afternoons, I’d never really had a girl of my own. It’s a queer business, that chasing of girls when you’re about sixteen. At some recognized part of the town the boys stroll up and down in pairs, watching the girls, and the girls stroll up and down in pairs, pretending not to notice the boys, and presently some kind of contact is established and instead of twos they’re trailing along in fours, all four utterly speechless. The chief feature of those walks–and it was worse the second time, when you went out with the girl alone–was the ghastly failure to make any kind of conversation. But Elsie Waters seemed different. The truth was that I was growing up.
I don’t want to tell the story of myself and Elsie Waters, even if there was any story to tell. It’s merely that she’s part of the picture, part of ‘before the war’. Before the war it was always summer–a delusion, as I’ve remarked before, but that’s how I remember it. The white dusty road stretching out between the chestnut trees, the smell of night-stocks, the green pools under the willows, the splash of Burford Weir–that’s what I see when I shut my eyes and think of ‘before the war’, and towards the end Elsie Waters is part of it.
I don’t know whether Elsie would be considered pretty now. She was then. She was tall for a girl, about as tall as I am, with pale gold, heavy kind of hair which she wore somehow plaited and coiled round her head, and a delicate, curiously gentle face. She was one of those girls that always look their best in black, especially the very plain black dresses they made them wear in the drapery–she worked at Lilywhite’s, the drapers, though she came originally from London. I suppose she would have been two years older than I was.
I’m grateful to Elsie, because she was the first person who taught me to care about a woman. I don’t mean women in general, I mean an individual woman. I’d met her at the Reading Circle and hardly noticed her, and then one day I went into Lilywhite’s during working hours, a thing I wouldn’t normally have been able to do, but as it happened we’d run out of butter muslin and old Grimmett sent me to buy some. You know the atmosphere of a draper’s shop. It’s something peculiarly feminine. There’s a hushed feeling, a subdued light, a cool smell of cloth, and a faint whirring from the wooden balls of change rolling to and fro. Elsie was leaning against the counter, cutting off a length of cloth with the big scissors. There was something about her black dress and the curve of her breast against the counter–I can’t describe it, something curiously soft, curiously feminine. As soon as you saw her you knew that you could take her in your arms and do what you wanted with her. She was really deeply feminine, very gentle, very submissive, the kind that would always do what a man told her, though she wasn’t either small or weak. She wasn’t even stupid, only rather silent and, at times, dreadfully refined. But in those days I was rather refined myself.
We were living together for about a year. Of course in a town like Lower Binfield you could only live together in a figurative sense. Officially we were ‘walking out’, which was a recognized custom and not quite the same as being engaged. There was a road that branched off from the road to Upper Binfield and ran along under the edge of the hills. There was a long stretch of it, nearly a mile, that was quite straight and fringed with enormous horse-chestnut trees, and on the grass at the side there was a footpath under the boughs that was known as Lovers’ Lane. We used to go there on the May evenings, when the chestnuts were in blossom. Then the short nights came on, and it was light for hours after we’d left the shop. You know the feeling of a June evening. The kind of blue twilight that goes on and on, and the air brushing against your face like silk. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons we went over Chamford Hill and down to the water-meadows along the Thames. 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It’ll never come again. I don’t mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being f
rightened, the feeling you’ve either had and don’t need to be told about, or haven’t had and won’t ever have the chance to learn.
It wasn’t till late summer that we began what’s called living together. I’d been too shy and clumsy to begin, and too ignorant to realize that there’d been others before me. One Sunday afternoon we went into the beech woods round Upper Binfield. Up there you could always be alone. I wanted her very badly, and I knew quite well that she was only waiting for me to begin. Something, I don’t know what, put it into my head to go into the grounds of Binfield House. Old Hodges, who was past seventy and getting very crusty, was capable of turning us out, but he’d probably be asleep on a Sunday afternoon. We slipped through a gap in the fence and down the footpath between the beeches to the big pool. It was four years or more since I’d been that way. Nothing had changed. Still the utter solitude, the hidden feeling with the great trees all round you, the old boat-house rotting among the bulrushes. We lay down in the little grass hollow beside the wild peppermint, and we were as much alone as if we’d been in Central Africa. I’d kissed her God knows how many times, and then I’d got up and was wandering about again. I wanted her very badly, and wanted to take the plunge, only I was half-frightened. And curiously enough there was another thought in my mind at the same time. It suddenly struck me that for years I’d meant to come back here and had never come. Now I was so near, it seemed a pity not to go down to the other pool and have a look at the big carp. I felt I’d kick myself afterwards if I missed the chance, in fact I couldn’t think why I hadn’t been back before. The carp were stored away in my mind, nobody knew about them except me, I was going to catch them some time. Practically they were my carp. I actually started wandering along the bank in that direction, and then when I’d gone about ten yards I turned back. It meant crashing your way through a kind of jungle of brambles and rotten brushwood, and I was dressed up in my Sunday best. Dark-grey suit, bowler hat, button boots, and a collar that almost cut my ears off. That was how people dressed for Sunday afternoon walks in those days. And I wanted Elsie very badly. I went back and stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face, and she didn’t stir when she heard me come. In her black dress she looked–I don’t know how, kind of soft, kind of yielding, as though her body was a kind of malleable stuff that you could do what you liked with. She was mine and I could have her, this minute if I wanted to. Suddenly I stopped being frightened, I chucked my hat on to the grass (it bounced, I remember), knelt down, and took hold of her. I can smell the wild peppermint yet. It was my first time, but it wasn’t hers, and we didn’t make such a mess of it as you might expect. So that was that. The big carp faded out of my mind again, and in fact for years afterwards I hardly thought about them.
1913. 1914. The spring of 1914. First the blackthorn, then the hawthorn, then the chestnuts in blossom. Sunday afternoons along the towpath, and the wind rippling the beds of rushes so that they swayed all together in great thick masses and looked somehow like a woman’s hair. The endless June evenings, the path under the chestnut trees, an owl hooting somewhere and Elsie’s body against me. It was a hot July that year. How we sweated in the shop, and how the cheese and the ground coffee smelt! And then the cool of the evening outside, the smell of night-stocks and pipe-tobacco in the lane behind the allotments, the soft dust underfoot, and the nightjars hawking after the cockchafers.
Christ! What’s the use of saying that one oughtn’t to be sentimental about ‘before the war’? I am sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It’s quite true that if you look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That’s true even of the war. But it’s also true that people then had something that we haven’t got now.
What? It was simply that they didn’t think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn’t that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably, and died more painfully. The farm hands worked frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what was called ‘respectable’ poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at the other end of the High Street, ‘failed’ after years of struggling, his personal assets were £2 9s. 6d., and he died almost immediately of what was called ‘gastric trouble’, but the doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he’d clung to his frock coat to the last. Old Crimp, the watchmaker’s assistant, a skilled workman who’d been at the job, man and boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren were howling in the street when they took him away. His wife went out charring, and by desperate efforts managed to send him a shilling a week for pocket-money. You saw ghastly things happening sometimes. Small businesses sliding down the hill, solid tradesmen turning gradually into broken-down bankrupts, people dying by inches of cancer and liver disease, drunken husbands signing the pledge every Monday and breaking it every Saturday, girls ruined for life by an illegitimate baby. The houses had no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings, the back streets stank like the devil in hot weather, and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so that you never went a day without remembering how you’d got to end. And yet what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren’t secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they’d got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn’t know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they’d known them. I don’t believe it made very much difference that what’s called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It’s true that nearly everyone went to church, at any rate in the country–Elsie and I still went to church as a matter of course, even when we were living in what the vicar would have called sin–and if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered that they did. But I’ve never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing in a future life. I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it’s precisely in a settled period, a period when civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future life don’t matter. It’s easy enough to die if the things you care about are going to survive. You’ve had your life, you’re getting tired, it’s time to go underground–that’s how people used to see it. Individually they were finished, but their way of life would continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn’t feel the ground they stood on shifting under their feet.
Father was failing, and he didn’t know it. It was merely that times were very bad, trade seemed to dwindle and dwindle, his bills were harder and harder to meet. Thank God, he never even knew that he was ruined, never actually went bankrupt, because he died very suddenly (it was influenza that turned into pneumonia) at the beginning of 1915. To the end he believed that with thrift, hard work, and fair dealing a man can’t go wrong. There must have been plenty of small shopkeepers who carried that belief not merely on to bankrupt deathbeds but even into the workhouse. Even Lovegrove the saddler, with cars and motor-vans staring him in the face, didn’t realize that he was as out of date as the rhinoceros. And Mother too–Mother never lived to know that the life she’d been brought up to, the life of a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s wife in the reign of good Queen Vic, was finished for ever. Times were difficult and trade was bad, Father was worried and this and that was ‘aggravating’, but you carried on much the same as usual. The old English order of life couldn’t change. For ever and ever decent God-fearing women would cook Yorkshire pudding and apple dumplings on enormous coal ranges, wear woollen underclothes and sleep on feathers, make plum jam in July and pickles in October, and read Hilda’s Home Companion i
n the afternoons, with the flies buzzing round, in a sort of cosy little underworld of stewed tea, bad legs, and happy endings. I don’t say that either Father or Mother was quite the same to the end. They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they never lived to know that everything they’d believed in was just so much junk. They lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn’t know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn’t blame them. That was what it felt like.
Then came the end of July, and even Lower Binfield grasped that things were happening. For days there was tremendous vague excitement and endless leading articles in the papers, which Father actually brought in from the shop to read aloud to Mother. And then suddenly the posters everywhere:
GERMAN ULTIMATUM. FRANCE
MOBILIZING
For several days (four days, wasn’t it? I forget the exact dates) there was a strange stifled feeling, a kind of waiting hush, Like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, as though the whole of England was silent and listening. It was very hot, I remember. In the shop it was as though we couldn’t work, though already everyone in the neighbourhood who had five bob to spare was rushing in to buy quantities of tinned stuff and flour and oatmeal. It was as if we were too feverish to work, we only sweated and waited. In the evenings people went down to the railway station and fought like devils over the evening papers which arrived on the London train. And then one afternoon a boy came rushing down the High Street with an armful of papers, and people were coming into their doorways to shout across the street. Everyone was shouting ‘We’ve come in! We’ve come in!’ The boy grabbed a poster from his bundle and stuck it on the shop-front opposite:
The Complete Novels Page 77
