School was not an affliction, but church or chapel or Sunday school was. At an early age I did not go regularly, nor I think did my parents. They were sober reverent people without a creed, though their disbelief in Hell and the Devil almost amounted to a creed. My father and I made merry over the Devil and the folly of believing in him as we supposed many did. He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel. Here from the prickly silence of two hundred or three hundred people I gradually came to feel a mild poison steadily creeping into me on all sides. I never made a friend of any of the boys who attended there. A deathly solemnity filled the chapel. After the service couples walked to and fro or gathered into knots on the pavement outside. The deathly solemnity was strong enough to cling about the people even there in the sunlight: some of them it accompanied to their one o’clock roast beef or mutton. But at first the Sunday-school was my particular allowance. I liked singing and liked the melodies of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ and ‘Fair waved the golden corn’, and I liked going with all the rest for the annual treat somewhere in Surrey, where I could run about in a wood, become fond of another girl or two (I remember one with a very deep but I think also husky voice), eat bread and butter, watercress and slices of cake and drink tea. The confinement in the schoolroom was not quite a positive ill. It was regular, it was inevitable, and until later on there was usually nothing in particular of which it deprived me except liberty. But Sunday was a bad day and this was the worst part of it. That deathly solemnity, whether we respected it or not, was equally thick in the schoolroom. I became accustomed to making a sort of drug of boredom. I did not rebel, but taking this poison became fairly oblivious to the good or evil that befell Jesus Christ, or Servetus, or myself. Moreover, I did positively loathe with continuous loathing the trailing with one or more of my brothers along the Sunday streets, in our stiff Sunday clothes and our Sunday hats. I hated these clothes and hats and I felt also that they made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. If the hat was blown off by the wind it was some relief: and I could then stamp on the thing and put it down to the wind and mud. What wonder that I made no friends under this Upas-tree. The majority of the children came from homes poorer or less refined than mine, and with the exception of one or two girls whom I thought pretty I looked down on them though ever so lightly. The few boys whose parents knew ours, if they never visited one another, never became our friends. Some suspiciousness existed between us which our best clothing did not permit us to destroy. Chapel and Sunday-school were to me cruel ceremonious punishments for the freedom of Monday to Saturday. I have still a profound quiet detestation of Sunday in whatever part of England or Wales it overtakes me, but most of all in London. I think I began learning to hate crowds and societies, and grown-up people, and black clothes, and silk hats and neatly folded umbrellas and shining walking-sticks, and everything that seemed a circling part of that deathly solemnity as I was not. Nevertheless, I may have looked decidedly a part of it with my shy bored silence, my fear of disagreement or quarrel in public, and my thin long narrow face that always shrank and chilled and stiffened into solemnity under the gaze of grown-up people, strangers, and numbers. There was, however, always one good thing about Sunday, and that was the biscuits, two large oval ones or one of these and two small round ones, which I found on a bedside chair upon awaking. The crumbs of these biscuits among the sheets became a nuisance; for we got up later on Sundays than weekdays.
The best of life was passed out of the house and out of school. I remember going out for the first time after scarlet fever. Perhaps because the spirit of many days had been stored up within me untouched, I felt that I was very strong and could do anything. I started to run; the eagerness of the spirit was overmuch; I stumbled and fell down.
One Christmas morning I woke up and felt a long lean smooth straight cold thing with straps at my bedside. It had a handle, and pulling that with one hand I brought out what I discovered to be a sword, while in the other hand was a scabbard. The daylight came upon me still unsheathing and sheathing the sword, trying hard for the hundredth time to put it back the wrong way. As soon as I could I fastened the belt round my waist so that the sword hung on the right instead of the left side and went out alone. The streets were empty. I was proud though without spectators. Once or twice the weapon caught between my legs. I marched up the street, crossed the road separating it from the Common and turned to the left between the elm-trees of Bolingbroke Grove, having the road upon my left, the Common upon my right. At the top of one of the streets parallel to ours, but at that time divided from it by that big private meadow with the pond and elm-trees, I stopped and looked down. For there lived Mabel Looms, a schoolfellow whom I adored. She had had a Christmas card from me that morning.
The street was empty. I walked backwards and forwards along the Grove past the top of the street, waiting, sufficiently proud not to be overcome by long disappointment. How many times since have I waited thus for somebody, with a dog’s patience. There began to be others in the streets. At last Mabel came up towards the Common, in the company of some elders. Without a sign I continued walking backwards and forwards. They turned to their left at the top, away from our street. I turned in the opposite direction homeward, pleased with my swinging sword and believing that the passers-by admired it. At home they knew well where I had been. My attachment to Mabel lasted for several years and more than once after it had been broken I attempted to renew it. She was a perfect loving friend. I thought her beautiful. Her hair was light brown, her face round rather than a long face. She had elder sisters — one named Agnes — whom I did not always like; and a brother named Arthur to whom I was indifferent; and a freckled slighter cousin, with a name something like Catherine Haythorn, whom I liked equally for her own and for Mabel’s sake.
Girls practically never joined in our games: even bowling our iron hoops beside their wooden ones was rare. Those girls who did play much with boys were scandalously talked about, but they were older than I was, and I neither knew nor know anything positive against them. I only have an idea that I had seen one of them — a deep-voiced dark-skinned good-looking girl who walked with long strides and a slight stoop — coming from among thick bushes with a boy or two boys. This caused laughter and was afterwards mentioned with hints and jeers which I do not think I understood: I became faintly curious and expectant; the veil over the sex thickened.
The Common and the streets leading up to it were the scene of our principal game. It was played chiefly on Saturday, our whole holiday. We assembled, for example, at the top of the road in the well-trodden garden of a doctor who had a rowdy son; each bringing a weapon or several weapons, wooden swords and pikes, or daggers, shields, pistols, bows, arrows, and with horns and trumpets, and perhaps some bread and cheese and an apple or orange. There sides were chosen. One side went out to seek a fort, in some one’s garden or among the gorse bushes. Then minutes later the other set forth, often in two divisions. Sometimes stealth was the rule of expedition; we advanced whispering and in some order. Sometimes everyone was shouting for his own plans and against another’s. At other times the methods alternated: the stealth would become wearisome, we began to chatter and disagree; or the riot of anarchy would suddenly strike us as wrong, everyone said ‘hush’, and for some minutes we modelled ourselves on Sioux, Mohicans, or Hurons, crouching, pausing, trying to hush the sound of our breathing. We forgot everything in this Indian ideal. Nevertheless, the enemy had to be found. Nor were they loth. Some one was sure to show himself and wave defiance, or to leap out on us, supposing we passed by. If seen at a distance they might change the stronghold and there would be a chase. If they were content to stand a storm, the second army would gather all its numbers together and, with yells and counter-yells, batter and push them out or be battered and pushed out itself. The struggle was one of character, not weapons. The side possessing the fiercest and most stubborn boys won. Th
e winners would then in turn fortify themselves and sustain an attack; and so it went on, until a mealtime, or nightfall, or rain, or a serious quarrel, finished the war.
At long intervals fiercer battles were waged. The boys of a neighbouring school of the grammar-school standard looked down upon the Board-school boys, or ‘Boardy Blags’ (i e blackguards). The Board-school boys resented this. The feud was usually hardly in so much as a smouldering condition, and so far as I know must have been all but forgotten. Then suddenly it would flame out. A loose army of Board-school boys several score strong moved along the Grove at the edge of the Common towards the enemy’s school. The army was continually being swelled from the side streets. With all the smaller or more timid boys hanging on its fringes, more angry than warlike, more curious than angry, the numbers were considerable. Stones were the longdistance weapons. But rarely, I think, did both sides muster a fairly equal army at the same time. When they came in sight of one another they began to throw stones. They halted, odd stones were thrown here and there, the hangers-on disappeared. I doubt if both sides ever advanced and clashed in hand-to-hand conflict. Usually after some challenging shouts, some wavering and dissension, the victors knew themselves and set up a shout and moved forward confidently. The smaller army broke and fled down the streets; the larger broke and pursued. Here and there a group kept together and set upon any solitary enemy it could discover. I, who was too small to be in the army, was content to hang on the outer outskirts, pick up the news, and occasionally insult one of the enemy if I remembered that he was one.
As a relaxation we hung about in corners smoking cigarettes of rolled brown paper. Making these, lighting them, puffing them, coughing, relighting them, asking one another if they were alight, and silently enjoying the act and the seclusion, filled hours.
Our sense of discipline was slight and transient. It was not encouraged by doing lessons, a few ridiculous exercises under the eye of an unsleeping master, and playing mostly individualist games in the playground. Being in a little mob increased our boldness and also our ease and safety. According to our tempers, I think we hoped that the others would either shelter us or support us in doing signal deeds. As member of the army, any one of us could most likely insult a passing outsider with impunity: if, however, there had been any swift retaliation the victim of it would often have been left to suffer alone.
Therefore the armies did not always wait for a formal order of disbandment. The Common, for example, offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with the rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places. Hawthorn and gorse clustered tall and dense in great and in little thickets. Tall elms and poplars stood about irregularly. And the level spaces suitable for cricket, football and tennis were not many. With this variety the Common, even though the railway ran through it parallel to Bolingbroke Grove and only two or three hundred yards away from it, was large enough to provide us with many surprises and discoveries for years. We could spend a day on it without thinking it small or having to retrace our steps. We wandered about it with or without our hoops. For any kind of hiding and hunting games the thickets were excellent. We played the other games in the open spaces. The ponds were for paddling in. One of them, a shallow irregular one, weedy and rushy-margined, lying then in some broken ground between the Three Island and the railway, was full of effets and frogs. Bigger boys would torture the frogs, by cutting, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat which was the operating table. The seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. At that time I could not have done it myself, but my horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity. I fished for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the long pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of ‘Backaruffs’ or ‘Pack of Roughs’, so I always thought, to the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays. I fished with a worm either tied on the cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam-jar. Once at least I did as I had seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little ‘blood worms’ that breed in mud, and sticklebacks, even a red-throated one, but never a gudgeon. The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks, perhaps chiefly for its comparative size, that many times I willingly paid a halfpenny for one and let it be believed that I had caught it. Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell, yet never dreamed of eating it. There were carp, too, in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond that lay half-way between the top of our street and the railway. By the longer pond I once saw a carp many times as big as a gudgeon in the possession of a rough: he had torn its head off to make it fit his jar. Much larger ones were talked about, caught in the Box Pond by the elder brothers of one boy. I saw them fishing there once or twice without a motion of the float in the motionless water. Once I tried there myself all alone. My expectations were huge: that I failed completely only increased my respect for the sacred pond. Bigger boys used to fish in the Penn Ponds at Richmond Park and allowed me to buy from them a perch of four or five inches long, which looked magnificent with its dark bars, standing almost on its head in my little round bowl. There in spite of worms and breadcrumbs it shortly afterwards died. I was pained at coming down in the morning and finding such a magnificent, uncommon and costly creature dead. Nor did I ever like the perch’s stiff hard prickly corpse, faded in death, and looking much smaller out of the bowl than inside.
The streets were a playground almost equal to the Common. The labyrinth of them, all running at right angles and parallel to one anther, with some culs de sac, could be mastered but indefinitely extended; every month or two I should think I added a street or two to my knowledge. Alone or with others I bowled my hoop up and down them either in purposeless pleasure or on some errand for my mother. Best of all errands was to the blacksmith’s to have a broken hoop mended. The smithy was a primeval forest cave that broke a line of ordinary shops. The bellows snored, the sparks spouted up, and the pallid, gaunt, bare-armed man made the anvil ring its double or its single song. When it was very cold I ran along with hands in pockets striking sparks out of the rough kerbstone with my ironshod heel. At night we often played games of hide and seek with lanterns. We picked up sides, fixed the boundaries which were not to be exceeded, and laid down rules against hiding in our own houses. One side went out to hide, to be followed in a few minutes by most of the other side, except one or two who were left behind to guard the home, which the other side had to reach without being touched. Setting out with bull’s-eye shining and a good companion, and exposing the others behind laurel bushes and catching them after a chase; or ourselves being the quarry and eluding capture for the whole evening whether with constant obedience to rules or not — these were great joys. If the game became monotonous we rang people’s bells and ran away, or we went into shops and asked for sweets with ridiculous names just invented by ourselves.
On Saturday sometimes I would go to Lambeth, two miles away, to take a message or a parcel for my mother, riding back by tram, or walking in order to spend the fare on sweets. I remember once, too, walking to Chelsea and back with an elder boy. As we went along the far side of the Thames he explained to me why it was women could plunge from greater heights into water than men. The Battersea side of the river was strewn with prodigious broken architecture very impressive to me and seeming of unknown giant antiquity.
When I was eight or nine, the boundaries of my domain were stretched by several miles all at once. I walked to Wimbledon Common. Of the first visit I have no recollection. But I can distinguish two later visits: one
because I discovered the joy of throwing stones over into the unknown depths of a great garden and hearing the glass-house break; another because I limped all the way back with a low shoe gone wrong. I did not go alone, but as one of several hangers-on to older boys and girls. We fished here and there with hopes of better things than came out of the Wandsworth Common ponds. We met strange boys there who occasionally possessed or talked about enviable fish. The three-mile walk was, however, good in itself, whether we went by Wandsworth, Earlsfield, or Wimbledon. We always recognized the old landmarks with pleasure and a kind of surprise. There would be a cage of pigeons or rabbits or guinea-pigs to look at outside a cornchandler’s, or an old man with some trait of surliness or quaintness whom we hoped to see again, or a chestnut-tree where we had to stop to throw up at the ‘conkers’, or a shop where we had once bought a specially good halfpenny cake. Other shops and houses had an altogether indescribable charm. Then Allfarthing Lane was worth going down for its name’s sake. We invented explanations and repeated those of our parents. At the top dwelt an old woman in what looked a one-room hut who presumably knew and had something to do with the origin of the queer name. But above all, whichever way we took, the Wandel had to be crossed. Going by Wimbledon we had to cross the bridge by the copper mill. You might stop to look down at the fish or along at the fishermen, or to carve your name on the parapet. In Wandsworth there were two bridges, fishermen hanging over the less frequented one who were never seen catching anything but never exhausted our curiosity. But best of all was the middle way through Earlsfield, crossing the Wandel at the paper mills. The smell of the mills wafted over a mile and a half on certain still evenings gave me a quiet sort of poetic delight. Hereby the water ran over a steep artificial slant, swiff, glittering, and sounding; and sometimes we stayed here and caught minnows instead of going on to Wimbledon. It was the first place where I saw and realized the beauty of bright running water. We paddled with our stockings in our shoes and our shoes tied together and slung over our shoulders. We talked and laughed and shouted and splashed the water. I cannot remember cold or rain or any clouds there.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 51
