Could it have been now — it was certainly not much later — that I began to want to have back my Fairy Know-a-bit? It had been lent to some one in Lambeth, and through my vague recollections of it, mingled perhaps with a desire for what had departed, especially as it had been my own, it acquired a fantastic value, as that book about ‘The Key of Knowledge’ had done; for several years I was always remembering it, pestering my father and mother to try to recover it.
VI. PLAYFELLOWS AND SWINDON EXPERIENCES
I made a few friends at this school, rather among those who lived in our suburban neighbourhood than among Battersea boys. One boy I used to go home with to a public-house where we ate scones out of a glass-covered dish: but when I went home with other Battersea boys it was to see the pigeons and rabbits only; I was admitted to the garden by a side door and never entered the house. My aunt was shocked at my proposal to go to tea with a boy whose father kept a public-house, even a very large one. On the whole they were a coarse rough lot, worse than the Board-school boys, or such was my opinion soon after I had left. Of my closer acquaintances only one lived very near us. We used to walk to school together almost daily. At this distance of time I recall but a single virtue that he possessed, that of perpetually laughing and scoffing, turning things and words round so that they could be laughed or scoffed at. He was puny and skinny, and his face was screwed up with quick Cockney malice and amusement. He had several sisters very much like him, always pattering and grinning. The family was a cheerful one, excellent at Christmas parties, just what our family was not: game was linked on to game and meal to meal with the utmost ease and jollity. I believe there were skeletons in the cupboard. Years afterwards my particular friend, to pay for racing and other pleasures, embezzled a large sum of money from his employers, and went first to prison and thence to a colony.
My other school friends lived farther away. I can scarcely recall more than their names and the streets they lived in. Two of them, brothers, reappear in my memory not at home but at Eastbourne, where it happened both our families were spending a summer holiday. Our lodgings were small and uncomfortable and indoors we were always squabbling or annoyed our father. Out of doors all was well. We loafed about listening to black minstrels who sang the songs of the day. We whistled the tunes till we sickened one another. We threw pebbles about. We ate as much nougat as we could afford. Every day we heard an old man with a rascally jaunty leer singing:
So, boys, keep away from the girls I say
And give them plenty of room.
I think it was only against matrimony. We rarely bathed, because we could not afford bathing machines every day and we could not swim and had not incitements to learn. The most strenuous thing we did was to walk up to the top of Beachy Head and then race the mile or more down into the town. The elder of the two brothers was by far the best runner. But as great as any of the joys of Eastbourne were the joys of looking forward and starting, and of returning and looking backward. How early I began to dislike the crowd and the conventions of the seaside it is impossible to say. Certain it is that the crowd on the beach and the constraint in our narrow lodgings had such an effect that I can recall practically no enjoyment in these earlier visits.
I try to guess why it was that I liked Charlie — , a dark-haired, tawny-skinned boy, whose family moved away to Norwich, or some such place, in the middle of our acquaintance. I can hear a common friend saying to me once, ‘You’ll miss old Charlie — , won’t you’, but I cannot recover anything about the boy. And there are some dimmer, and others who are just faces with a certain expression which from time to time I recognize on the platforms at Victoria, Waterloo, and Clapham Junction.
Though I may have liked Eastbourne better than I think, I liked Swindon infinitely better than Eastbourne. Probably we were only two or three weeks by the sea, and then my next brother and I went to Swindon to finish out the holidays. For some good reason I preferred the sons of Swindon mechanics and labourers to the sons of Battersea tradesmen and clerks. I had forsaken the girls. With the boys I fished, played and rambled as before. When I was thirteen or thereabouts I was first introduced to a slaughterhouse. It backed on to the canal and had a disused door at that side with a broken panel imperfectly covered from within by a piece of sacking. Through this we peered, often to no purpose beyond sniffing the smell of blood and staleness, more rarely to see a carcass being cut up or the floor being washed out, three or four times to see a cow killed, or a calf, still jerking from the beam overhead, being flayed. The novelty drew me, and overpowered the horror and uncertain expectation which made my heart beat furiously and my lips go dry. A sort of broken-down half loafer, half drover, led in the cow. A rope round her neck was put through a hole in the doorpost and pulled tightly so that her head was low. The man held on to the rope-end with all his might. The tall pale butcher came along, shoved her a little sideways to get her perfectly into position, and brought down the pointed knob of the poleaxe smartly upon her forehead. The rope was slackened, she fell heavily. The man thrust a cane into the opening in her forehead, ‘to stir the brains’, said my fellow watcher. The butcher cut her throat and the blood rattled into a bucket, while the man stood, with one foot on the ground clear of her gesticulating legs, and one upon her flank, working it up and down to help the blood out.... I always looked on with dread equal to my hope that there would be something to see. The silence alone made it endurable: the shrieking of a pig I never could have endured. The only physical pain I could myself inflict with pleasure was upon fish. My usual bait for jack was a small living roach. By means of a tiny needle the line was threaded under about two inches of the fish’s skin, so that the big double hook lay close against its side and was not easily torn away by the act of casting the bait out to a distance of ten or twenty yards. Thus armed, the roach swam about to the best of its ability until it was seized by a jack or became so feeble as to be unattractive and useless. Now in order to damage the bait as little as possible I always used the utmost care to prick the skin only and not the fish in attaching the hook; when it was done for, either I threw it into the water to die slowly, or I destroyed it. And there were several ways of destroying a little fish. For example, I could stamp it violently out of existence. Or I could break its head off. Gradually I found myself mildly enjoying the act of driving my thumb-nail through the neck or into the back in several places. The body quivered violently; but no sound was made, nor did the eyes express anything. If the root of the tail was squeezed hard between two finger-nails the quivering went on for a long time. Several times I forced the bladder out of the body. But these were isolated brief pleasures. I did nothing else of the sort. I never intentionally tortured an animal, though I did protract the drowning of a cat by putting it into a copper that had not been quite filled: as I sat on the lid I sang street tunes very loudly to hide the sounds within and to keep up my courage. I hated having to kill a wounded pigeon. Nevertheless I did it, with a beating heart. When I killed my first snake — it was in reality a blindworm — I stabbed it so frenziedly that I was lucky not to hurt myself; the frenzy being due partly to suppressed fear, partly to the novelty. As to fish, I very soon began to pride myself on killing what I caught instead of throwing it into the hedge behind, as the factory men usually did, there to die slowly. Pressing the under jaw of the jack against a stone I bent his long body up and over until his neck was broken and his back met his upper jaw. With a smaller fish I inserted the two first fingers into the gills and forced back the head until it was loose. I think that care and pride in doing this neatly and swiftly obliterated any mere pleasure in pain, though it was, I think, accompanied by a slight suffocation and beating of the heart and clouding of the brain.
There was a new game which I never cared about even on my first and last evening with its inventor. Known by the name of foxing, it meant following up lovers in our meadows and lurking behind hedges to watch them. Our leader had a spy-glass of some kind and seemed to think it worth his while. He apparently knew far
more about the ways of girls than I had any chance of knowing or guessing. To me they were attractive but remote, forbidden, and, even so, inferior to boys and somehow incompatible with them. The ordinary Swindon games never had time to lose their flavour. The speech of the boys, the humming mellowness of it, the rolling r’s, the strange idioms and words, remained a half-conscious delight. One day one boy said to another named Bacon who was losing his temper: ‘Simmer down, rasher’, and I was continually recalling and tasting the phrase and the accent and the boy’s look. These boys were regarded by my elders as below me. They were never invited to the house and, if they called, my grandmother affected a very comical look of ignorance as to who they were and what they wanted. Efforts were made to lure me away from them up to the schoolmaster’s house, where there were a boy and a girl of about my own age. They were all very well but tainted in my fancy with the dreary virtue of elders, so that I could never treat them quite seriously as playmates. The atmosphere of the house was awful. The fact that the father was a head master was enough. It seemed inhuman that a head master should also be a parent, should concentrate upon two helpless children for hours together. Man and wife were entirely kind. But I remember his kind voice. I suppose it was a pure sham. And then the cake there! was it a regularly recurring accident or was it choice that brought on to the table at teatime what had been, or might have become, but was not, a cake? It was in crumbs and steaming hot. Once inside the mouth doubtless it was much the same as a true cake, but the revolted eyes always condemned the thing. Perhaps nothing in that house could have been right. For example, the pictures of hunted and dying stags by Landseer on the walls of one room were simply among the instruments of torture which we endured there, for about two hours, once or twice a year, for our parents’ sake. But fishing was now the chief pleasure; the chief glory to come home with roach even no more than six inches long strung through their gills on a thorn stick with a crook. Whatever fish I brought home I as often as not scaled, gutted and fried myself, unless they were big enough to be worth my grandmother’s serious attention. So long as it was not cold only the necessity of being in to a meal brought me away from the canal-side. Roach were good enough. Tench were the height of my ambition. When a fish kept biting gently without being hooked, as especially if the float dipped slantwise, I began to hope for a tench. This hope was better than catching roach. Time after time I threw out my line softly to this one spot until it was too dark to see the float. After a series of such evenings I caught my first tench. It was at the edge of the town, not in fact beyond the first bridge, through which nothing but fields were to be seen, but at a disused landing stage. The water here was much disturbed by ducks. But the position had this advantage — that I had behind me a street or a back-garden where I could run and hide if the water bailiff or ‘cut fellow’ appeared. For I still fished without a licence.
And now, when I no longer needed his help at fishing, my uncle packed a box, had a man in to paint his name on it in large white letters, and when it had stood in the passage for a day or two, departed with it for South Africa. Home can have had little charm for him. He was tired of the same job, the nagging, one year after another; better pay and a new life lured him away. With a jaunty laugh deprecating my grandmother’s tears and blessings and my aunt’s fierce distress, with a sixpenny bit each for my brother and me, off he went, walking beside the man who wheeled his box to the station, a woman in a cap with her hands under her apron watching him from half the doorways in the street, he once or twice waving. It was said that were some girls who would have been sorry to see him going.
At home now my mother was nursing her sixth and last boy. I had known very well for some time that a baby was to come. I had been anxious for my mother, walking beside her with care lest she should trip at the kerbstone or over a skipping rope. She never said a word about what was approaching, though I dare say she knew that I knew. Then one night I heard a baby s crying. A little afterwards my father came upstairs, I think to get some sleep in my room. Finding me awake he spoke to me; and presently I said something about ‘the baby’, by which he learnt that I knew. It was the end of July. In a few days we were at Swindon out of the way.
After Wiltshire, I believe, a month or two had to elapse before we condescended again to Wimbledon. But Merton, at length rediscovered, was in some ways equal to Wiltshire. It was our very own. Henry, the pigeon-keeper, had a hand in the rediscovery. He used to talk about Cannon Hill, about an inn called the ‘George’, and so on, with more facts that convinced me this was the land I had slipped into on the day of the paper-chase. So finding my way back again I began an exploration of a couple of square miles of country which had never been completed. I learned to know it so well that Henry used to put it down to me when he found a rare nest robbed there. When I say rare, I mean anything more important than a thrush’s or blackbird’s nest. I was flattered when he said to some one: ‘Mr. Bloody Thomas has been there’. This must have been later. I had only just become a collector.
There were caterpillars on lime and poplar, sluggish mousy moths in the grass tufts, of our own suburban commons. To cherish the caterpillars and kill the moths with the fumes of crushed laurel leaves added something more to the zest of life. But as yet I had hardly taken my first bird’s egg, and for a year or two yet the chief merit of winter was that it provided materials for skating, sliding and snowballing. Not that I was a good skater. I was even quite a bad slider, unable to avoid turning slowly round on a long slide and so ending with my face towards the start. Sledging suited me far better. When the snow was hard and not too deep I speedily laid a few boards on a pair of runners; and in an hour or two after the plan was made I was being pulled or pulling another over the snow to the tune of as many bells as could be had. It was a refinement to shoe the runners with strips of zinc, which, however, wore out in a few days. This was glorious in the sun. But I think perhaps it was somehow better at night in the thick fog. People went about with lanterns and you could get lost, or if not you could pretend to, and stay out late. It was good also to belong to a search party and, perhaps, in spite of a lantern, turn out to be lost yourself or back at your starting place. Clapham Common on those foggy nights was in many ways like desert undiscovered country, yet perfectly harmless.
Even the way home from school held its adventures. There was, for instance, a fight with a schoolfellow who gave me once for all the felicity of holding him round the neck with one arm while I punched his face with the other. More memorable still was the solitary adventure of ringing, not for the first time, the bell of the big house and being run down by the coachman. As he was the son of our greengrocer, an agile middle-aged respectable woman with long curls, I expected him to behave leniently. But he shut me up in a dark outhouse for two hours. I took my revenge. The place contained sacks of oats for the horses, and into these I put a number of steel pens, having first broken them so as to make two sharp stiff points. These, I firmly hoped, would ultimately destroy the horses belonging to my tormentor’s master. The hope gave me not only consolation, but a feeling of glory and power and evil as I at last hurried home to tea.
VII. ANOTHER NEW SCHOOL
When I was about twelve I entered my fourth school as free scholar. The scholarship examination is a lively memory. All the competitors, about twice as many as there were places to be filled, were from my own school. The humming, ha-ing head master hovered about us, yet failed to see that one of us was cheating by very freely using a book. He was not a boy whom I should otherwise have feared, and in my eagerness to win I over-rode the customary objection to telling tales and, with a friend, I gave an account of the matter to the head. Both of us informers were elected to scholarships.
The boys at the new school resembled those at the private school. They were superficially more refined than those I had just parted from; their speech was better; their code of honour more strict; and there was an esprit de corps amongst them. The elder boys conducted themselves in a dignified manner, which I adm
ired, apart from their skill at games or at the performances of The School for Scandal and other plays at the end of the winter term. Cricket and football were organized. Two or three elevens played a succession of matches with neighbouring schools; and the practice was keen and regular. The very fights were decorous. A ring was made: the enemies fought decently, silently, and, to my judgement, with great skill. The games were linked to the school work by the drill. Our drillmaster was a florid pompous old sergeant of impressive erectness and chest measurement. With a great voice and a little cane he compelled us to execute complicated marchings and stationary wavings of poles and dumb-bells. When one of the indoor masters joined him as a spectator the sergeant bent towards him, smiling from time to time with ineffably respectful superiority.
The head master was a serious high-minded incapable martinet with the boys, a meek husband to a stout, possibly imperious wife. This mistress of the head master was continually bursting into the school assemblies or the class-rooms to complain or to ask for an explanation of some breach of manners. A boy wearing the school cap had not doffed it to her in the street. The workmen about the place had complained of the bad language used by the boys. Her daughter had seen boys behaving rudely to one another. An unindustrious noise had been heard coming from a certain master’s classroom when he was known to be out. She shrieked; she panted; she introduced tears into her voice; she appealed to us as Englishmen, sons of gentlemen, scholars of ‘our school’. The head master or master bowed his head, gravely endeavouring to translate her tirade in a style at once moderate and pleasing to her; the boys assumed the frightful solemnity of those who dread to laugh. I remember her once present at an election of officers for the Second Eleven football club. A friend and I were rivals for one office, and after politely voting for one another, we were announced equal. The dear lady now raised her voice to give the casting vote to a young master who, she was certain, would not go wrong. I expect I need not say that I was not elected.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 55
