If I cannot call up images of most of the streets as they were then, because I have witnessed the gradual development since, perhaps the reason is the same for my being unable to call up images of my father and mother or of my brothers. No. I have only one clear early glimpse of my father — darting out of the house in his slippers and chasing and catching a big boy who had bullied me. He was eloquent, confident, black-haired, brown-eyed, all that my mother was not. By glimpses, I learnt with awe and astonishment that he had once been of my age. He knew, for example, far more about marbles than the best players at school. His talk of ‘alley-taws’ — above all the way his thumb drove the marble out of the crook of his first finger, the speeding sureness of it — these betokened mastery. Once or twice I spent an hour or so in his office in an old government building. The presence of a wash-stand in a sitting-room pleased me, but what pleased me still more was the peculiar large brown carraway biscuit which I never got anywhere else. My father at this time gave or was to have given lessons to Lady Somebody, and he mentioned her to me once when we were together in his office. She became connected somehow with the carraway biscuit. With or without her aid, this rarity had a kind of magic and beauty as of a flower or bird only to be found in one wood in all the world. I can hear but never see him telling me for the tenth or hundredth time the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers hanging in a chain over a bridge to fetch the moon out, which they had mistaken for a green cheese, and the topmost one, whose hold on the parapet began slipping, crying out, ‘Hold tight below while I spit on my hands,’ and many another comic tale or rhyme. My mother I can hardly see save as she is now while I am writing. I cannot see her but I can summon up her presence. She is plainest to me not quite dressed, in white bodice and petticoat, her arms and shoulders rounded and creamy smooth. My affection for her was leavened with lesser likings and with admiration. I liked the scent of her fresh warm skin and supposed it unique. Her straight nose and chin made a profile that for years formed my standard. No hair was so beautiful to me as hers was, light golden brown hair, long and rippling. Her singing at fall of night, especially if we were alone together, soothed and fascinated me, as though it had been divine, at once the mightiest and the softest sound in the world. Usually perhaps there was a servant, but my mother did everything for us in the house, made many of our clothes and mended them, prepared and gave us food, tended us when sick, comforted us when cold, disappointed, or sorrowful. The one terrible thing I witnessed as a small child was my mother suddenly rising from the dining-table with face tortured and crying, ‘I am going to die.’ My father took her on his knee and soothed her. I had and have no idea what was the matter. For her younger sister I felt a similar affection and admiration, though less, and far less often exercised, for her visits were neither long nor frequent. The grace, smoothness and gentleness of her voice and movements gave me pleasure. My first conscious liking for the female body was at sight of her sitting less than half dressed in a chair, her head bent and one foot on to which she was pulling a stocking lifted from the floor. Years afterwards I used to think of this from time to time to envy the privilege of early childhood. She sang livelier songs, e g from Patience, than my mother ever did. But she did not know our ways and her complaints or corrections were harsh by comparison with my mother’s.
Not long after I began to attend school I went away alone with my mother for a long holiday. We spent a week here and a week there in different friends’ houses. We stayed at Much Birch Vicarage in Herefordshire. It had a shrubbery, a carriage gate. I ate custard out of a custard glass; once I agreed to have a second helping of something if I could have a clean plate, and this made people laugh and look at one another.... In a house, probably at Newport, Monmouthshire, that had a tower or was higher than its neighbours, and in a very light many-windowed room, I sat among grownup people and asked for mustard with my mutton.... I walked up a steep street in Newport, looking at the houses on the right-hand side and thinking of a school-friend of my mother’s, named Lucy, whom I had never seen.... At Newport also I saw the dark damp-looking oldish house on a hill, with trees and iron railings round it, where my mother as an orphan lived unhappily for many years with two maiden aunts. Then I went to Caerleon upon Usk to see another and blameless great-aunt named Margaret. I see small houses and gardens on one side and the Usk on the other between steep banks. An idiot passes with boys following him. My aunt’s house was the last, as if you could go no farther on account of a bend in the river. There were beautiful great rosy apples in the garden, and a well with a broad stone over it, and ivy and snails on the narrow paths. Then for the first time I thoroughly understood what wells, apples, and snails were. Indoors there were more great apples: it was not always possible to finish what was so happily begun. A smoked salmon hung up in a whitewashed kitchen or pantry, and I think I should know the taste again if I could ever meet anything so delicious, but I no longer expect to find it under the name of smoked salmon. There also I first learnt what a river was, having previously seen nothing better than the Thames, almost as broad as it was long at Westminster. The Usk was not too broad; it was winding; I heard the sound and felt the flood of it. Also I was told that a certain islet or peninsula or level meadow half encircled by the water was the site of King Arthur’s Round Table. Either ideas suggested by ‘King Arthur’ and ‘Round Table’ even then vibrated in my brain or they remained there until, a very short time afterwards, they did so undoubtedly when united with the stories of love and battle in The Adventures of King Arthur and his Round Table. One day, moreover, a porpoise came up the river, and men rowed a small boat hither-thither, and shouted and lifted up their oars and struck heavy blows on the water, not (I think) on the porpoise. And in memory I see all together the riverside street old and rustic and an idiot coming up it, the Usk and the men hunting the porpoise in the bend round King Arthur’s Round Table. Away from the river rose a green hill and a stone farmyard wall athwart its slope and I saw black pigs hustling through the gateway at the end of the wall. My mother was with me.
Afterwards we had some days at Swansea with a great-aunt Mary and I saw the sea and the Gower cliffs and rocks. I collected shells and pebbles that took my fancy, especially one rounded one like a Bath bun which we took back to the garden at Swansea, where it remained for twenty years and more. I have loved flat or round seaworn pebbles ever since, and can never carry away as many as I wish from a new coast or hillside where I am walking.
This holiday gave me the most definite and most pleasant of my very early memories, together with some less definite ideas associated with Caerleon and Wales which afterwards increased, I might almost say magically, by the aid of things heard in home talk or read in books, and of a visit several years later.
Until that visit I can discern no landmarks. My waking life was divided between home, school and the streets and neighbouring common. Glimpses of the outer world I had few. But I remember General Gordon’s death at Khartoum, and, whether from a picture in a newspaper or from imagination, I retain an image of a soldier in a fez and armed with a revolver standing with his back to a portico, facing the enemies who swarmed up the steps below and being struck at by one from the side.
Our street like three or four others parallel to it was in two halves, running straight up the opposite sides of a slight valley, along the bottom of which ran the principal street of mixed shops and private houses. Our house was low down in the half which ran up westwards to Bolingbroke Grove, the eastern boundary of Wandsworth Common. These little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses in unbroken lines on both sides of the street had each, even then when they were new, something distinguishing them and preventing monotony. The people in them made them different. In addition, some were beginning to be draped in creepers. Some gates stood open, some were shut. One had bushes in the garden, another had flowers, another nothing but dark trodden gravel. The house above ours, in the next pair, was presumably meant for a doctor, and possessed a coach house which looked almost as if it
belonged to us. That was our outward distinction. Inside from the front door to the back of the house there was as long a passage as possible, the rooms opening out of it. The staircase ran up to a room with an opaque glass window in the door, a second room, and two others connected by a door. The rooms downstairs I hardly remember at all. But in one of them my great-uncle James Jones lay asleep after dinner, a red handkerchief covering his face and trembling in the blast of his snoring which we called ‘driving the pigs to market’. Through the open window of another, one Mayday, Jack-in-the-Green bounded in to beg a penny, showing white teeth, white eyes, black face, but the rest of him covered and rippling with green leaves. The passage was a playground when it was too wet or too dark to be out of doors. Here, when I had at any rate one brother — probably three or four years old when I was five or six — who could run, we two raced up and down the passage to be pounced upon by the servant out of a doorway and swallowed up in her arms with laughter. Upstairs the room with the glass door was at long intervals occupied by a visitor, such as my father’s uncle James or my mother’s sister, and I think cards were played there. Except relatives I think there were few visitors to the house. Sometimes the old red-faced gent next door, a court usher, came in: and once as he laid his hand on a large sheet of printed matter, perhaps at an election time, he said impressively, ‘I am a staunch Liberal, staunch.’ Once a young couple had tea with us and everyone laughed at some cheerful remark about the lady’s name being about to be changed — I and at least one brother slept in one of the two connected bedrooms. I had no night fears and few dreams. Several times some shapeless invisible thing threatened me at the end of the bed and I lay in terror, trying vainly to scream for help. On Christmas morning I used to wake up in the dark and smell the oranges and feel my presents, and guess at them and begin an apple and go on to sweets, especially those contained in a cardboard box scented curiously, loaf-shaped, and coloured like a top of a bun, which came from a cousin of my mother’s at the Much Birch Vicarage. When I and a brother were recovering from scarlet fever we lay or sat up in our cots, while our father in the other room read aloud the Cuckoo Clock. Not a shred of the story is left to me, but I seem to see my father — thought I could not see him at the time — sitting in an arm-chair bent over the book. He also read at least the opening chapters of Great Expectations, with such effect that, though I have never since looked at them, I have an indelible impression of a churchyard in cold and misty marshland and out among the stones a convict in clanking chains, and a tiny feeble boy with the absurd and as it were enfeebling name of Pip. I do not know whether I read Robinson Crusoe or had it read aloud to me. I loved it entirely, and a faint spice of amusement was added to my love by the repetition of ‘says I’ Two scenes most impressed me. The first was the picture of men tumbling savages over the sides of a ship by means of brushes like a sweep’s dipped in tar. The second was where wolves are pursuing a doomed riderless horse over the snow. But I cannot remember the act of reading this or any other book at home. Fairy Know-a-bit by A.L.O.E. was read to me. The fairy in it was created for the purpose of imparting facts about things in everyday use. The facts though not distasteful passed rapidly through my brain, and the fairy, though probably an inartistic invention, fascinated me and attained such a measure of reality for me that I used to fancy it possible for him to appear from between the leaves of some big old book as he did in the story. To my mind the book would have been a certain cookery book with pictures of flesh, fish, and fowl, or dishes. There were, I suspect, invented fairies in another book which had and has a charm impossible for me either to communicate or, I fear, to make credible. It was my first school prize. The words, ‘The Key of Knowledge’, occurred in its title or they stood out somewhere else. It was illustrated by coloured pictures. But it disappeared, I never had any idea how, before I had read far into it, and I never saw it again. From time to time down to the present day I have recalled the loss, and tried to recover first of all the book, later on the thread of its story, something that would dissipate from its charm the utter darkness of mystery. For example, fifteen years ago in Wiltshire two strangers passed me and I heard one of them, a big public schoolboy, say to the other, a gamekeeper, ‘What do you think is the key of knowledge?’ and back again came the old loss, the old regret and yearning, faint indeed, but real. There were times when I fancied that the book had held the key to an otherwise inaccessible wisdom and happiness, and the robbery appeared satanically sinister.
I was not much at other boys’ houses except for Christmas or birthday parties. We met either in the street or in the back gardens, where some had swings fixed. Most of them lived in the same street, but their parents and mine were not as a rule on terms of more than distant acquaintanceship. The chief party was the doctor’s, some time soon after Christmas. There was a great crowd of strange boys and girls whom I had got to like and hate, or be indifferent to, for a few hours, and probably never saw or thought of for another twelve months. Most were older than myself; some, I was conscious, had parents who were richer or of different class; we were restrained and suspicious of one another, and the only unquestionably good things there were the mince pies, jellies, sausage rolls — Now and then we visited friends in Lambeth, where my father and mother had lived from their marriage up to the time of their removal to Wakehurst Road when I was about two. I remember the girls faintly, not so as to describe them, but well enough to wish that I could see them again to revive their images. In most houses I had at least a preference for one of the girls and liked to be teased afterwards for having kissed her in a game of forfeits, or for shouting her name up the chimney.
II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS
When I think of school I smell carbolic soap. I see the caretaker by the wall of one room ringing the bell. I deposit my weekly fourpence on the master’s desk. I go round, as a privilege, filling the scores of inkpots from a tin with a long thin spout. I join in the one-verse hymn before and after lessons. I see large light bare rooms with a map or two, and boys in long parallel desks facing a master; for we were soon separated from the girls. We repeated aloud ‘Witney on the Windrush manufactures Blankets’. We learned the names of the tributaries of the Thames for ever and ever. What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never tired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line of the Hebrides I think I actually loved. One of the masters, named Jones, was little, with dark prominent eyes, round plump red face and quick steps and fiery temper; another, named Spragg, was a tall fairer bony man, who had a deep resonant voice; and I think that once when the two quarrelled the tall one lifted the little one into the air. There was a third named Wigley, a mild man, a chewer of his moustache, who struck me as feeble even before Spragg got the better of him in a tussle. The head master was short, square-shouldered, lean, pallid, bearded, took long rapid strides with head low and projecting, flat high overhanging forehead, deep-set eyes, always on the verge of anger, a harsh barking voice, a general expression of dark solitary determination. He appeared unexpectedly from time to time in the several classrooms which I passed through in the course of three or four years. Sometimes he went by me in the street, his hands in his black overcoat pockets, an umbrella under his arm, overtaking everybody, with rapid sidelong dark glances.
I remember crawling in and bursting out, but very little about school itself. We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, parsing, were easy to me, and I did them pretty well. Sometimes things were tediously easy to me, sometimes I took a pleasure in overcoming what looked hard and of course in earning praise, reward, a superior position. I rather liked wearing the numbered ticket on examination days, and took pride in having the numbers neatly printed in black ink with a 4 rather than an open 4 and so on, as I did in saying,
when questioned, that my father was an ‘Officer’ in the Civil Service. Discipline was strict. I think I must have been usually fully employed, save for glances at the clock. At any rate I know more about what I did before and after than in school. The one moment in school at this time which I cannot forget is when I found myself being lifted from a grating where I had fallen, having been hit hard in the stomach by a boy on my way from the classroom to the main exit. In the hard asphalt playground we played rounders and egg-cap and games with tops, marbles and cherrystones. Going home, we spun our tops or two of us helped ourselves along by bowling hoops or by playing a progressive game with a marble or a stone each, called Buckalong. We used to exchange things and ratify the deed by touching the iron with which our heels were shod, saying ‘touch cold iron can’t change back’. We used to make fun of a solitary boy, probably of a better class than ourselves, who used to live in the same street and walked about with a snake round his wrist. We called him ‘Soppy’, prepared to run away. But he never retaliated or took any notice of us. My friends were chiefly boys of our street; if other boys harassed us we used to say ‘My father’s a policeman’ to frighten them. But only one grievance remains in my mind, that an older boy, not of my acquaintance, once lured me to drink urine by offering it to me in a bottle as ginger-beer. Some time later on a Sunday I pointed out this boy standing with others by the Three Island Pond, and my father clouted his head.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 50
