by James Hilton
“But of course all that was years ago—and in another age, because 1914 was really the end of an age. It was not only that things happened differently before then—they happened to people who FELT them differently. Take chapel-going, for instance. If you had walked up Mill Street almost any Sunday forty years ago, you would have seen from the notice-board outside that William Boswell was to preach there. That man was my father. It would be a cold, raw night, maybe, with mist peeling off the moors, but the folk who wanted to hear him were hard-wearing stuff; in twos and threes they mustered, till by six o’clock the little gas-lit pitch-pine interior was almost full. Punctually on the hour old Jack Slater went to the pedal harmonium (the Methodists of the sect my father belonged to did not believe in pipe-organs) and let his fingers wander over the keys according to a style of his own, beginning softly and working up to a great roar, his feet pounding as if he were bicycling uphill to save a life. By this time my father had emerged from the side vestry, Bible in hand, and climbed the steps to the pulpit, where he prayed standing (for the sect did not believe in kneeling or stooping), and announced the opening hymn in the boomingest voice I ever heard. He was a fine-looking man, as you can judge from the photograph in my study; his hands were big and thick-fingered; his hair, black and bushy, crowned a well- shaped head set firmly on broad shoulders. He never drank, smoked, played cards, went to Browdley’s one theatre (there were no cinemas in those days), or read a novel or a Sunday newspaper. A life that might have seemed, to an outsider, full of hardships relieved only by boredoms, had somehow or other produced in him an air of sombre majesty that I could never come to terms with, and I don’t think my mother ever could either. We lived at Number Twenty-Four, a four- roomed house identical with eleven on one side of it and thirty-two on the other. Parallel with Mill Street stood Jenny Street and Nathaniel Street, composed of houses exactly similar. From the pavement one entered by a single step through the usually unlatched front door; at the back, however, there was an exit through the kitchen into a small paved yard where coal was stored and clothes were hung to dry. I suppose there was no labour-saving device in general use in those days except the Singer sewing machine that, surmounted by a plant pot with or without a plant in it, stood behind the lace curtains in nearly every front window. And there was gas-light downstairs, but not upstairs; and sanitation had but recently progressed in Browdley from the stinking midden to the back-to-back water-privy. There were no bathrooms, and baths were taken once a week by heating pans of water over the kitchen fire. I give you all these details because I hope by the time you grow up most of them will be a bit historical—at any rate I hope Mill Street won’t be in existence for you to verify. Mind you, these houses were not slums (as they are today), but typical dwellings of respectable working folk such as my parents were. Respectability even imposed a toll of extra labour, for it was a sort of ritual to wash and scrub the street-pavement from the front door to the kerb, a task undone by the next passer-by or the next rain-shower. When my mother was ill, as she often was during the last years of her life, this necessary tribute to tribal gods was made on her behalf by an obliging neighbour, though I doubt if my mother would have cared much if it hadn’t been. She was a merry little woman with an independent mind uncoupled with any determination to stake out a claim for itself; this made her easy to get on with and rather hopeless to rely on. My father only saw her between six and ten in the evenings (the rest of the time he was either at work or asleep), and during the annual holiday which they took together, always at Blackpool, the strain of trying to seem familiar to a man whose life was so separate from hers made her almost glad when the week was over and she could return to the far more familiar routine of Mill Street. She loved my father well enough, but the emotion of being in love had probably not survived courtship, and by her thirties, with an already numerous family to look after, she had worn her life of household drudgery into an almost comfortable groove. Every morning in the bedroom overlooking the backs of the houses in Nathaniel Street, the alarm-clock rang at five-fifteen; without a word my mother would get up, come downstairs in her nightdress, and poke up the kitchen fire that had been banked with small coal overnight. Then she would fill the kettle to make tea, and by the time this was ready my father would be down himself, washing at the kitchen sink and ready to leave as soon as the clock- hand approached the half-hour. He was never exactly bad-tempered, but the fact that they were both sleepy made them reluctant to talk; there was, anyhow, nothing much to talk about. A few minutes after he had left the house the whole town resounded with the crescendo of the mill ‘buzzer ‘, but by that time my mother was back in the warm bed, content to doze again while the clogged footsteps rang along the pavement outside. To her this pause between my father’s departure for work and the beginning of her own was the pleasantest time of the day—and the only time she was really alone. By eight o’clock she was dressed and downstairs, glancing at the morning paper, making more tea and frying a rasher of bacon for herself. Then came attendance on us children, getting us off to school when we were old enough, and after that a routine of house-work and the morning walk along Mill Street to the shop at the corner where nearly everything could be bought, from feeding- bottles to flypapers. She would chat there to Mr. and Mrs. Molesworth while they served her; she liked a joke and an exchange of gossip, and often, if the jokes and the gossip were good enough, she would stay talking and laughing until other customers joined in, so that the shop became a sort of neighbourhood club for housewives.
“Then during afternoons, if the weather were fine, she would put the youngest of us (me, in fact) into a pram and wheel it round a few streets, sometimes as far as the canal-bank or the Shawgate shops. Towards four she would be home again, in good time to prepare an evening meal. Then came the second pleasantest interval—the hour in the rocking-chair with a cup of tea at her elbow before the children came home from school. While winter dusk crept across the sky, and until the passing of the lamp-lighter sent a green-yellow glow through the fanlight over the front door, my mother would ‘save the gas’ by poking the fire to a blaze while she rocked and sang. She had a nice voice, small in volume but always true on the pitch, and though most of the tunes she knew were chapel hymns with rather grim words to them, she sang them somehow gaily and with a lilt, breaking off occasionally into a popular song of the moment, something half-remembered from the previous year’s Blackpool holiday, or from summer performances of the Silver Prize Band in Browdley market-place.
“My earliest recollections, Martin, were of my mother rocking and singing like that. There was a brass rail that ran along the whole length of the mantelshelf, and as I first remember it this rail would shine in the firelight with the shadows darkening all around and my mother’s face growing fainter and fainter as she swung backwards and forwards; till there was only the sound of her singing, the creak of the rocking-chair, and the simmer of the kettle on the fire-bar… Then, all at once, I would wake up to see the room already gas-lit, with my father standing, huge and unsmiling, in the doorway.
“I feared my father and loved my mother and that’s about the plain truth of it. On Sundays he locked up all story-books, picture- books, and even bricks that spelt out words; but while he was at chapel my mother used to unlock them with a key of her own and let me play till just before his return was expected; then she would whisk away the forbidden things with a knowing glance that finally became a sort of joke between us.
“That is the home I was born in, Martin—not as happy as it might have been, but not as unhappy either. So I don’t complain of it, but I do want to make YOURS happier. Which is why I intend soon to begin putting books in your way, because the more freely and vividly you see things while you are young, even if you can’t fully understand them, the more actively they will possess you when you grow up—especially if, in adult life, you have hard battles to fight and bitter disappointments to face. New worlds, Martin, are for the young to explore; later one is glad of a new room, or even of
a view from a new window…”
He put aside the fragment then, thinking he would add to it on many succeeding nights, but he never did; perhaps the rare mood never recurred.
* * * * *
As the post-war slump deepened and unemployment filled the street corners with lounging, workless men, George encountered new opposition to his Mill Street housing scheme. Many of the cotton mills were closing down completely; some of them went bankrupt as catastrophically as had Channing’s a generation before, but without the criminal taint, though the short-lived boom had been pushed by speculators to limits that were almost criminal.
Among the mills that closed was the one still called Channing’s, though long operated by another firm; now, when George walked down Mill Street, the mill loomed up, symbolically as well as actually, at the dead end of the street. Derelict, like Stoneclough five miles away, it stood for the dead end of what the Channings themselves had stood for. Still physically intact, with machines inside that could spin and weave, nobody would buy it or use it, because nobody wanted what it could do. Yet the illusion that it still had some real value was preserved; it was regularly taxed and insured; the Browdley police kept an eye on it, the fire department were ready to quench the blaze should any lightning or arsonist strike. But neither did, though lightning had once, when George was a boy, struck the Methodist chapel at the other end of the street.
The chapel also stood, a little less forlorn than the mill— derelict, one might say, only six days out of the seven. For Methodism in Browdley, like the cotton trade, was not what it had been. People could not afford to give so much to their chapels, nor were there so many Methodists. George, walking along the street where he was born and which he planned to rebuild for others to be born in, remembered those early days when both mill and chapel had flourished, and when his own father, sharing the week between them in that mystic proportion of six to one, and with his house half-way between, had served a life-sentence longer though less stigmatized than that of his boss.
The reason George visited the Mill Street area so often was not a sentimental one. Indeed, it was concerned with drains rather than dreams; for the more graphically he could report to the Council how bad the houses were and what disease-traps they had become, the sooner he hoped to get his scheme actually started.
He found a powerful ally in Dr. Swift, Browdley’s medical officer, who had himself issued many warnings. After a long struggle and against the bitter opposition of a few of the town’s old- established doctors, a system of free immunization against diphtheria had been set up, enabling parents to have their children inoculated at a municipal clinic. It was, however, impossible to make this compulsory, and the whole question became impregnated with political and even religious prejudices that George deplored and perhaps at the same time aggravated by his own constant argument that it was not enough to immunize; the CAUSES of epidemics should be tackled, and the chief was bad housing. To which the opposition retorted that George was using the health issue for his own political ends, that Browdley was in no greater danger than other manufacturing towns, and that though the Mill Street area was somewhat less salubrious than the rest, what could be done about it when local tax rates were almost the highest in the country? And since the opposition, fighting on this tax issue, had won seats at recent Council by-elections, George found his slum- clearance project losing rather than gaining ground for the time being.
He often walked with Dr. Swift through the worst of the streets, the medical officer supplying scientific ammunition for George’s continuing struggle on the Council. For George would not give in; there was a point, even though at times it was hard to find, beyond which he would not even waver or compromise. Indeed, his mere mention of Mill Street had begun to send a smile or a sigh across the Council Chamber, so well was the subject now recognized as the bee in George’s bonnet. But he did not mind. “Sooner or later I’ll wear ‘em down,” he assured Swift, to which the latter replied grimly: “Better be sooner.”
For it had been a hot summer. Towards the end of September over twenty diphtheria cases appeared in and around Mill Street, mostly among young children, of whom five quickly died.
In such an emergency Dr. Swift was given command almost without restrictions; everything remedial was promptly organized—the quarantining of families, wholesale inoculations, closing of schools, and so on. The Council had adjourned for its four weeks’ annual recess; many councillors were still on holiday. But George, who had the Guardian to look after and could not afford a holiday, was right on the spot to say ‘I told you so’ to any former opponents he might meet. They were not so much his opponents now. They all agreed, in principle, that something would have to be done about the Mill Street area. And most agreed, in principle, with the Guardian editorial in which George wrote:
“We must learn our lesson from this tragic visitation. Though the epidemic has now (according to the latest assurance of our eminent and indefatigable Medical Officer, Dr. Swift) been checked, we can never again feel secure until preventable disease has been ABOLISHED AT ITS SOURCE. Let those citizens who live in the more fortunate parts of Browdley and whose children have remained unscathed, bear in mind the joint responsibility of us all for what we allow to happen anywhere in our town, and let them do their share, and PAY their share, in making Browdley safe for our children’s future.”
The only adverse comment George got about this was from a new Catholic priest, Father Harry Wendover, of St. Patrick’s, who questioned the phrase “what we allow to happen in our town”. Having been introduced to George at a meeting, he immediately buttonholed him with the query: “Isn’t that a bit arrogant, Mr. Boswell? After all, even if you don’t believe in the hand of God, you might at least recognize that there are limits to what the hand of Man can do.”
George noted the newcomer’s tall gaunt frame and deep-socketed eyes, the strong chin and the cultured accent, and decided that here was a man to be both respected and tackled. Rumour had already informed him that Wendover was something of the proud cleric, so George answered, giving as well as taking measure: “Aye, there are limits, I daresay, but in Browdley we’re still a few thousand miles away from ‘em. And as for the hand of God, what makes you think I don’t believe in it?”
Wendover smiled—a rather pleasant smile. “To be frank—just gossip. That’s all a priest has to go by when he comes to a new place and wants to find out who’s who.”
“So they gossip about me, do they?” And immediately George was thinking about Livia and what sort of gossip might still be circulated about her.
“Oh, nothing malicious. In fact, you seem to be extremely popular. But they also say that you’re not a God-fearing man like your father, that you don’t often go to church or chapel, and that you’re on good terms with atheists and agnostics.”
It was all spoken with a twinkle that made it inoffensive and not quite serious, but George would not have been offended in any case. He was already too interested in what promised to be an argument.
“Aye,” he answered. “I’m on good terms with anyone who’ll help me make Browdley better. Romans, Church of England, Methodists, Atheists, Agnostics —they’re all one to me if they’ll do that.”
“So religion has no place in your better Browdley?”
George appreciated a nicely laid trap, especially when he was in no danger of falling into it. He smiled as he had so often smiled across the Council Chamber or a meeting-hall. “Nay—I’d rather ask you if MY better Browdley has a place in YOUR religion? Because if it hasn’t you’ll not do so well at St. Patrick’s. I’ve got a lot of supporters there.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Boswell?”
“No—just a tip. I’ve no hell-fire in my armoury. All I can tell folks is that diphtheria comes from bad drains, but of course if they’re more interested in pearly gates that’s their look-out.”
Wendover’s smile broadened. “If I were old-fashioned I’d probably say that God would punish you for blasphemy. But my
conception of God isn’t like that. I doubt that He’ll find it necessary to strike down you or one of your family just to prove a point.”
George grunted. He had an idea that Wendover was enjoying the encounter as much as he was, and already he recognized an agile mind. Agile minds were useful, and it might be that Wendover would take the progressive side in many of the town’s controversial issues. George also realized that priests and parsons had to stand on some ground of their own, not merely on what they could share with every liberal-minded thinker, politician, or social worker. All this weighed against his impulse to continue the argument combatively, so he replied: “I assure you I didn’t intend to be blasphemous, and I hope you’re right about God. I don’t think I know enough to agree or disagree with you. So I’m sticking to what I do know something about, and that’s Man. Seems to me Man could give himself a pretty good time on earth if only he went about it the right way, but he just won’t. You’d almost think he didn’t WANT a good time, the way he carries on.” But that looked like the beginning of another argument, so he shook hands with a final smile and left the priest wondering.
A few days later Wendover wondered afresh when news spread over the town that Councillor Boswell’s baby had been stricken. But being honest he did not exploit the situation. Nor did he actually believe that the hand of God was in it. He just thought it an extraordinary coincidence, which it was, and wrote George a note that merely expressed sympathy and hoped the child would be well again soon. For he liked George.
