The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  The thing I liked best was being sent on errands in Bermondsey. They became explorations, and I made every excuse to lengthen them. I pushed down south to the Dun Cow in the Old Kent Road, eastward by side streets and alleyways to Tower Bridge. I had a special pleasure in the rank places like those tunnels and vaults under the railway: the smells above all made me feel importantly a part of this working London. Names like Wilde’s Rents, Cherry Garden Street, Jamaica Road, Dockhead and Pickle Herring Street excited and my journeys were not simply street journeys to me: they were like crossing the desert, finding the source of the Niger. London was not a city; it was a foreign country as strange as India and even though I knew the Thames is a small river compared with the great ones of the world, I would patriotically make it wider and wider in my mind. I liked the Hide Market where groups of old women and children hung about the hide men who would occasionally flick off a bit of flesh from the hides: the children like little vultures snatched at these bits and put them in their mothers’ bags. We thought the children were going to eat these scraps, but in fact it is more likely—money being urgent to all Londoners—they were going to sell them to the glue merchants. The glue trade haunted many busy Cockney minds. Owing to the loop of the river, Bermondsey has remained the most clannish and isolated part of London; people there were deeply native for generations. Their manner was unemotional but behind the dryness, there was the suggestion of the Cockney sob.

  “What’ll y’ave? Lovin’ mem’ry or deepest sympathy?” the woman in the shop asked when I went to buy a mourning card for one of our office cleaners.

  I would pass the Tanners Arms and wonder at the peculiar fact that the owner had a piece of tanned human skin “jes like pigskin.” The evenings came on and a procession of women and children would be wheeling their mattresses up to the railway tunnels or the deep tube station to be safe from the occasional raids. I would see other office boys wearing their bowler hats as I wore mine: we were a self-important, cracked-voice little race, sheepish, yet cocky, regarding our firms with childish awe.

  But my work was dull. The terrible thing was that it was simple and mechanical; far, far less difficult than work at school. This was a humiliation and, even now, the simplicity of most of the work in offices, factories and warehouses depresses me. It is also all trite child’s play and repetition and the correcting of an infinitude of silly mistakes, compared with intellectual or professional labour. Most people seemed to me, then, and even now, chained to a dulling routine of systematized and tolerated carelessness and error. Whatever was going to happen to me, I knew I must escape from this easy, unthinking world and I understood my father’s dogged efforts to be on his own, and his own master. In difficulty lay the only escape, from what for me seemed to be deterioration of faculty.

  The dullness, the long hours, the bad food, the low pay, the paring away of pleasure to a few hours late on Saturday afternoon, the tedious Sundays brightened only by that brief hour at the Sunday School—all these soon stunned and stunted me in my real life however much they moved me to live in my imagination. I accepted, with the native London masochism, that these were hard times and that this was to be my life. London has always preferred experience to satisfaction. I saw myself a junior clerk turning into a senior clerk comfortable in my train, enjoying the characters of my fellow travellers, talking sententiously of the state of affairs in France, Hong Kong and Singapore and, with profound judiciousness, of the government. Over the years one would know these season ticket holders—perhaps not speaking to them—as well as the characters in a novel. Sometimes there was an oddity—the man who read Virgil as he travelled up and down. And there was always, for diversity, the girls who knitted for the soldiers and read novels. There was also the pride I felt in being enslaved in a city so world-famous, in being submerged in its brick, in being smoked and kippered by it. There was the curious satisfaction, in these months, of a settled fate and the feeling that here was good sense and, under the reserve, humour and decency.

  But the office was brutalizing me. One morning I arrived and began teasing Daulton, the other office boy. He was slow and childish. I was trying to make him say: Parson’s Kway. He would take that from a clerk but not from an equal. He saw an enemy and flew at me. It was delightful: it was like being at school again. We were soon rolling on the floor and I was laughing, but he, I saw, was savage. Old Haylett wobbling up from the W.C. found us dishevelled in the dust. He put a stop to it and Daulton, trembling, began to cry. What had I done to him? He was afraid of getting the sack. Haylett took his side. So did the clerks. Daulton was their joke and treasure. I was spoiling it. When the cashier came he called me over and I said we were only “having a game.” “You have upset Daulton,” the cashier said gravely. “I am surprised at a boy like you wrestling with a boy of that type. You went to a better school than he did.” And I who had thought that Daulton and I were fellow victims! Daulton gave me a look of pompous disapproval and wistful reproach after this. The matter went on being debated by the cashier and the clerks, and I saw that I was in serious trouble. It was discussed with one of the partners. I became scared when he sent for me and came away incredulous. I was to be promoted. I was to go into the warehouse and learn the trade.

  My life became freer and more interesting at once and I scarcely spoke to Daulton after that.

  The firm was run by Mr Kenneth whose chauffeur brought him up from the country at ten. Mr Kenneth came in burdened like Abraham and went, knees bent, in a fast aged shuffle, like a man stalking, to his office where he was soon ringing his bell. About the same time his four sons arrived, four quarrelling men between thirty-seven and fifty years old. The firm was a working model of that father-dominated life which has been typical of England since the Elizabethan age and perhaps always, for we must have got it from the Saxons and the Danes. In the Victorian age, with the great increase in wealth, the war between fathers and sons, between older brothers and younger, became violent, though rather fiercer in the middle-class than among manual workers where the mother held the wage packet. Until 1918 England was a club of energetic and determined parricides; in the last generation the club appears to have vanished altogether. So, in their various ways, Mr James, Mr Frederick, Mr William and Mr John, active and enterprising City men, were at war with each other and attacking Father when one or other of them was in favour. Mr John, the youngest and most genial, was the only one to regard the fray with grinning detachment. He sat on the opposite side of his father’s desk, unperturbed.

  Mr James was the eldest, a precisionist and cultivated and intelligent man; he dealt in heavy leather. Mr Frederick, handsome, dashing and hot-tempered, whose eyes and teeth flashed operatically, was in foreign hides, a very speculative market; he lived in a fine house in Regent’s Park; Mr John drawled a shrewd and lazy life among fell-mongers and raw pelts; Mr William, to whom I fell, had an office on the warehouse floor and dealt in basils and skivers, i.e., tanned sheepskins. On this subject, under his teaching, I was to become an expert.

  The British merchant has the reputation of being a deep and reserved, untalkative fellow, slow to act until he is certain, not easily deceived and a shade lazy. The four brothers entirely contradicted this legend, except in one respect: they were not easily deceived. Reserve they had none. They talked and shouted their heads off, they exposed their passions, they were headlong in action, as keen and excitable as flies and worked hard. Mr William was the most emotionally self-exposing of the brothers. He was a sportsman who had played hockey for England, a rather too ardent and too reminiscent golfer and extrovert. Owing to a damaged knee he was rejected for the Army during the war. His emotionalism annoyed his brothers. He would come into the office crying out: “Father hates me. James has been telling Fred …” and so on, a wounded and sulky man. What their differences were I don’t know; but they were strong enough to break up the firm when the old man died.

  I had often known the chapel-like groans of the main office to be interrupted by a pair of these s
torming brothers who pranced in a hot-tempered ballet. There had to be a peacemaker or catalyst and there was.

  When I described the arrivals at our office there was one figure I did not mention: a dandy called Hobbs. For some reason he was not called Mr Hobbs and these were the days before people called anyone but a servant or a workman by Christian or nickname. The voice in which Hobbs was addressed was reverent; it might have been used to a duke who had, for some reason, condescended to slum with us all; it was a tone of intimacy, even of awe. He was on simple, equal terms with everyone from the old gentleman down to the boys. One finds his type more often in the north of England than in the south, and indeed he came from Leeds and had a faint, flat weary Yorkshire accent. His speech was plain but caressing. He had walked into the business, in his deceptively idle way, some years before and discreetly appointed himself to be the brains of the firm. To everybody and to me especially, he was the only person to whom I could talk. He was a man of about thirty.

  One saw him, a tall thin figure, a sort of bent straw, but paddling down Weston Street early in the winter mornings, in his patent leather shoes, his fur-lined overcoat reaching to his ankles, his bowler hat tipped back from a lined forehead and resting, because of the long shape of his head, upon a pair of the ugliest ears I have ever seen. His little remaining hair rose in carefully barbered streaks over the long, egg-like head. A cigarette wagged in his mouth, his face was pale, seamed, ill and amused. Hobbs was a rake and his manner and appearance suggested days at the races and evenings at the stage door of the Gaiety, and the small hours at the card table. He looked as if he were dying—and he was—the skull grinned at one and the clothes fluttered about a walking skeleton.

  Eyes bloodshot, breath still smoking gin or whisky of the night before, he arrived almost as early as the office boys in order to get at the office mail before anyone else saw it. He memorized it; he was now equipped to deal with all the intrigue, quarrels and projects. By some nervous intimation he knew whenever a girl came into the office and he smiled at them all and his large serious eyes put them into a state. To all, at some time or other, he said “Darling, I’d like to bite your pretty shoulders.” Except to the dragon, the old man’s secretary, who often handed out religious tracts. She saw in Hobbs, no doubt, an opportunity for rescue and he deferred to her and started reading a line or two of the tracts at once while she was there and making expert comments on a passage in Exodus or Kings, so that the old lady began to blush victoriously. Girls liked to be caught in the warehouse lift with him for he instantly kissed their necks and looked their clothes over. His good manners overwhelmed Mrs Dunkley-Dunkerley in her kitchen. All office work stopped, even the cashier stopped his call-over of the accounts, when Hobbs went to the telephone and smiling at it, as if it were a very old raffish crony, ordered a chauffeur-driven Rolls to collect him in the evening and pick up one of his girls to take them to dinner at the Ritz. The partners listened to him in fright, wondering aloud about his debts, but would soon be confiding in him, as everyone else did and be angling for his advice.

  “Look what Father has done. James has told Father that Fred …”—Hobbs who always wore his bowler hat in the office and was the only one who was allowed to smoke, nodded and listened with religious attentiveness. The appearance of physical weakness and dissipation was a delusion. The firm chin, strong coarse mouth, the rapidity of mind, were signs of great nervous strength. The partners were gentlemen of the cheerfully snobbish kind. Hobbs was an intellectual from a provincial university who had read a lot and was a dilettante. His brain was in a continuous and efficient fever. If trade was slack and he had no business or customers to deal with, he’d go round the office and, with a smile that they could not resist, would take the clerks’ pens from them with a “By your leave, laddie” and do all their accounts and calculations in a few minutes while they gaped at him. Their lives were ruled by having to work out exasperating sums as, for example, 3 cwt. 2 quarters 9 lbs. at 3s. 4½d. per lb. less commission and discount of 3½ per cent. He could do scores of sums like these in a few minutes. Or, for amusement, he would tot up the head cashier’s ledgers so fast that this sorrowing and very pious man would look over his glasses with admiration and momentarily forgive Hobbs his obvious debauches. With the workmen he was the same; he got them out of the labourious messes they made of their weighing slips, gave them racing tips, was knowing about prize fights and once in a while would buy them a drink in the pub next door where he was well known. Where was he not well known!

  “Out of the great kindness of your heart, duckie,” I’ve heard him say to the barmaid of a discreet hide-out near London Bridge, “would you give me a rather large gin and French?”

  I had to work with Hobbs and soon, infatuated, I dressed exactly as he in white coat and bowler hat, pushing it back over my ears in helpless admiration of him. I had to sit with him and keep the Epitome Book, a summary of the hundreds of letters that came in. I have always been prone to intellectual disaster. For years I thought this book was called the Opitomy Book, for I used to think of Epitome as a three syllable word.

  I was enraptured by Hobbs. For a boy of sixteen is there anything like his first sight of a man of the world? I was enraptured by London Bridge, Bermondsey and the leather trade. I liked its pungent smell. I liked watching the sickly green pelts come slopping out of the pits at the leather dresser’s down the street, I liked paddling among the rank and bloody hides of the market; I would cadge the job of cutting the maggots of the warble fly out of a hide in our hide shed. I liked the dirty jobs. I wanted to know everything I could about leather. Gradually, literature went out of the window: to be a leather factor, or, better still, a country tanner was my dream. I spent my days on the seven floors of the warehouse, turning over dozens of calf skins with the men, measuring sheepskins and skivers and choking myself with the (to me) aromatic shumac dust. At home the family edged away from me: I stank of the trade. With my father and me it was a war between Araby and the tanpit.

  The leather trade is an interesting trade, for skins and hides are as variable as nature. At certain seasons, in the breeding season, for example, the skin will be hard and “cockled”; heavily woolled sheep like the merinos drag the surface of the leather into ridges so that the body of some old man seemed to lie under my measuring ruler. Some skins are unaccountably greasy and have to be degreased; others may have heated in the hold of a ship; yet others may have been over-salted by a tanner who perhaps hopes when the temperature rises, that they will pick up moisture and weight. After a time one could tell from which town and county of England any skin came and from which tannery, for each tanner had his own methods, his peculiar waters and style. The names were cheerful: skivers and basils, shoulders, bellies, split-hide bellies and butts—the animals seemed to lie ba-aaing and lowing, as one looked at the grain of the skins for their quality or their defects; to see which could be dyed in red or green, say, or which—owing to the flaws in the grain, would have to be dyed in the cheaper black. There was change in every bale that the crane lifted off the vans and heaved into the “gaps” where the men chalked the tally on the walls. And change in the human scene too. On market days, many of the tanners came to the office. They came mainly from the small towns of England and the variety of character fascinated me. A brash bearded fellow in a cowboy hat who came roaring in and shouting that we were “a lot of stuckup London snobs” and his money was as good as ours; the trembling pair of elderly black-bearded brothers from Dorset who stood together, shoulders touching, like Siamese twins and had the suspicious and dour look of conspiring lay preachers; the flash Welshman; the famous sole leather man from Cumberland; the sad country gentleman tanner from Suffolk; the devastating fashionable tycoon who was making a fortune, wore a monocle, was something to do with Covent Garden Opera and introduced me to the name of Flaubert.

  In due time I was sent down to the wharves of Pickle Herring Street or the docks, to make reports on damaged skins that had been dropped into the river, o
r on thousands of bales which had come in from Australia. A literary job: as the bales were opened for me in these warehouses that smelled of camphor or the mutton-fat smell of wool or rancid furs, I wrote in my large book, an estimate and a description. It was curious to open a bale from the ship or barge alongside and to see, as one got to the centre of it, that it was blackening with heat and at the centre, charred and cindery. When I grew up and read Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman I knew the pleasure he felt in the knowledge of a trade, its persons and its ways. If I knew nothing else, at the end of four years I was proud of my knowledge of leather. It was a gratifying knowledge. During the last war I had to spend some time in shipyards on the Tyne and the Clyde and the passionate interest in a craft came back to me; and although I was then an established writer, I half wished I had spent my life in an industry. The sight of skill and of traditional expertness is irresistible to me.