A London Child of the Seventies

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  III. Round the Year

  A FEW definite occasions throughout the year were celebrated whatever our circumstances or whatever the weather.

  The earliest of these has now all but died out. February 14th comes and goes unnoticed. But St. Valentine was a reality to us. Why this Christian Martyr should be connected with love affairs no one seems to know. Probably his feast is a survival of a pagan one in spring, like the famous Furry in Cornwall. As children we took full advantage of it, and spent our pocket-money in buying valentines and sending them (always anonymously, that was de rigueur) to cousins and friends. The little shops near us, and the stationers in Upper Street, used to fill their windows with the regulation cards. Indeed they were more than cards, for the better ones consisted of shallow cardboard boxes, decorated with paper lace surrounding a coloured device of forget-me-not, or a picture of a boy and girl bowing to one another, with a verse of sentimental nature below. Some contained a present of a pair of gloves or a purse or a tie. All of us ‘had a valentine’—a sweetheart of some kind, whose name we kept as a dead secret, and there was much fun trying to guess the senders.

  In later years I tried in vain to buy a valentine, even going to Whiteley’s for the purpose, and reminding the shop-walker with some acerbity that they called themselves ‘universal providers’. Upon this he became facetious and I thought it best to say no more.

  The boat race was the most absorbing topic of the spring. For some unknown reason we were all violently Cambridge. So much so that I fancied there was something definitely disgraceful about Oxford. Long before the great day people showed their colours, nearly every horse wore a piece of ribbon, and little errand-boys came to open blows in the street as to the respective merits of the Universities. When I was pursued by cries of ‘Yah! dirty Cambridge!’ I felt like planting a blow myself. The journey to the river was a fairly long one, and when the tide obliged the race to be early the boys seemed to get up in the middle of the night. In spite of my intense interest in the race, I never went to see it. I never went to any entertainment, not even to the Agricultural Hall, where the boys used to go continually.

  All Fools’ day had to be observed at school or outside the house somewhere, for the family was too alert to be taken in. We knew all the time-honoured errands for pigeons’ milk, strap-oil, fresh salt, and plaice without spots. Nothing would induce us to move a step to ‘come and look’ at anything until noon on April 1st. But we enjoyed recounting our triumphs at tea in the evening, and also our defeats, for after all a really clever defeat could be saved up and tried on someone else next year.

  None of us, so far as I remember, ever went to the Derby, but the race was a great subject of talk, and my father always got up a family sweepstake. It seemed such a serious occasion that I had a vague idea that it had started in Old Testament times.

  Bank holidays were much the same for Londoners as they are now—a day for remaining at home or for getting as far away as possible. In this matter we divided. Mother and I did the one, and my father and the boys the other. They used to start off by an early train, and take one of their colossal walks into the country, or else go fishing in the River Lea. Then off went the servants somewhere (probably to Hampstead Heath) for the entire day. Mother and I stayed at home to enjoy what she called ‘the freedom of the wild ass’, with no lessons, no proper meals, no duty walks, and above all no chance of callers. As soon as the boys had gone I used to watch for the big wagonettes full of children going off to Chingford or Epping for the day. They used to sing and wave flags, and I waved to them. After this the neighbourhood became sepulchral—‘silence like a poultice came to heal the blows of sound’. Mother must have been very clever in thinking up jolly things to do, for I can never remember feeling dull or out of it when the boys went off anywhere. She had the knack of vicarious enjoyment, and we used to live through what the others were probably doing: ‘Now they are having their sandwiches’, ‘Now I expect they have caught some fish’, ‘Perhaps Charles has done a sketch’.

  After tea it was my cue to watch at the window for the return of the wagonettes. I must say I took a grim pleasure in the peevish tones that came from the tired children, and the scoldings of the mothers, not to mention the lack of song and flag-waving. Our next business was to lay the cloth for supper and make a big spread for the hungry home-corners. At one such evening meal mother exclaimed, ‘How well you look, Dym!’ The others smiled in a gratified way and spoke of the health-giving properties of country walking. It was not till many days had passed that they told her how Dym had fallen into the river and barely been saved from drowning. He had been taken to an inn, put into a hot bath, rubbed down, wrapped in blankets while his clothes were dried, and given whisky. No wonder, as he was hurried home as fast as possible, that he looked a bit rosy. He had a delicate chest, and had once been at death’s door, while we crept about the house, alarmed at the arrival of a second doctor.

  Strange as it seems today, when excursions are so cheap, a London family often went without any ‘summer holiday’ at all. There were certainly ‘excursion trains’, but they meant all that was horrible: long and unearthly hours, packed carriages, queer company, continual shuntings aside and waiting for regular trains to go by, and worst of all the contempt of decent travellers. We had a little rhyme about them which ended:

  Grown old and rusted, the boiler busted

  And smashed the excursion train.

  So for a large family a trip to the sea-side was an expensive affair. In the years when we did not go to Cornwall, therefore we either bore the heat of London or had a fortnight at Walton-on-the-Naze. It looks very near on the map, but it was quite a business to get there. Liverpool Street was never the easiest of stations to start with, and then we had to change at Colchester. I can still see my mother’s anguished face at this junction, as she got us all out, counted our many parcels, went to see if the heavy luggage had been shifted, made repeated inquiries (so as to make sure) as to the right platform, and then packed us all in again for the final lap. As a rule, my father could only get away for week-ends, when he and Charlie Absalom or an uncle would come by steamer.

  The cabman at Walton knew us, and the landlady at the lodgings welcomed us, and all the troubles of the journey were quickly forgotten as we rushed to greet the sea. Although the place has now been improved beyond recognition with hotels, restaurants, and new types of boarding-houses, the sea and its attractions are just the same. Buckets and spades are the same pattern and colour, sand-castles and fortifications no grander or stronger than ours, donkeys just as recalcitrant. Indeed, we had one advantage over the children of today, for no one had discovered that continual paddling was bad for you, so we were barefoot all the time, in and out of the water, scrambling over breakwaters, fishing for crabs, collecting shells and stones, and screwing our toes into the wriggly sand.

  At an ill-starred moment mother decided that I was old enough to bathe like the boys. She selected for her experiment a nice pool beside a long, low rock, discreetly far from the main beach. I was quite excited at the idea of doing something like the boys, consented to be stripped, and paddled boldly forward. Mother thought that all she need do was to carry on with her sewing, and throw me words of encouragement. ‘Sit down, darling. Splash about a little. Go a little farther in. Don’t mind getting wet all over. It won’t hurt you….’ But there I stood, not quite knee-deep, fixed, with a safety-first idea. Now mother had no use for obstinacy, and thinking me no more than obstinate she laid aside her sewing with some sharpness, walked along the rock, stooped and seized my readily outstretched hand, at the same time giving me a little jerk forward and downward into the water. Aware now that my last moments were approaching, I pulled my hardest. Mother’s foot slipped, and flop! she went headlong into the pool. Her summer frock, a mass of flounces and ribbons, her beautiful wide hat…they hardly bear thinking about. She managed to dress me somehow, to gather up her sewing, and walk back to our lodgings, dripping water all the way, adding greatly
to the cheerfulness of the ‘front’.

  When my father was told of it he said I ought to be punished, ‘because a child should be taught to recognize a disaster when it happens’. However, he added, ‘You punish her, dear. It will come better from you.’ As this was his well-known method of getting out of something he hated doing, they both laughed. The only upshot was that mother was promised a new dress, I had a big hug from my father on the quiet, and my bathing lessons were postponed.

  To vary our shore pleasures we used to strike inland, and were in real country at once, for there were no ‘respectable’ roads and villas surrounding the place. Frinton lane was a lonely walk, almost alarmingly so, with its trees overhead. To me it was the ‘shady lane’, down which Tom and Jane met their death in the poem from eating ‘scarlet berries’. Mother’s horror of deadly nightshade was only equalled by her fear of green paint. The mushrooms and blackberries we brought in added pleasantly to our landlady’s limited cuisine. Her apple tarts and puddings were really clove confections flavoured with apple.

  When the boys were off on some long wet-weather tramp, mother and I stayed in our lodgings. She would sketch something from the window, or else do a bit of necessary sewing. She hated sewing so much that she generally stood to do it. I have inherited both the hatred and the posture, but am still puzzled at the reason for standing. Does it get it over sooner? At home, mother coped in a simple way with the eternal mending required for the family. She hired an extremely old maid to spend every Friday with us. There she sat all day, at a little table in the kitchen window, mending. She would never lend her scissors, not for a moment, and if I asked her to ‘button me up’ she would do it very slowly, and say, ‘Patience is a virtue.’ This sounded like a text, but I believe it was a hideous thought entirely her own.

  While the boys were off, and mother busy, I was completely happy with a wooden stool on four legs, padded with red velvet. It was a treasure belonging to the landlady, who brought it out for me specially, with the request that the young gentlemen should not sit on it. Mother, knowing the young gentlemen, hid it always until they were out of the way, and then I had such glory with it that it compensated for my being left at home. It became in turn a table, a bed, a funeral coach, a train, a station, a pirate vessel for stealing mother’s brushes or cotton, and oftenest of all it was Bucephalus, on which I careered about the room, conquering country after country. The boys returned all too soon.

  Back again in London we had to settle down to a long stretch of ‘everydayness’. October is bound to be enjoyable always, but November meant fogs, trees bared before they had time to get red and gold, and perhaps ‘doing without a fire’ because it was not quite cold enough. The one excitement to be certain of was the Lord Mayor’s Show, coinciding with the Prince of Wales’s birthday, and a school holiday. Needless to say, I never saw the Show myself. The boys always went, and came home full of their struggles with the crowd and their prowess in elbowing their way to the front. It seemed to me something like the way Cinderella went to the ball, from their description of the coach. They always brought home for me a little book, that opened out to nearly a yard of coloured pictures, displaying all the features of the Show. This was called ‘A Penny Panorama of the Lord Mayor’s Show’, and the name pleased me so much that for days afterwards I would go about the house pretending to be a hawker, crying:

  Buy my Panorama, my penny Panorama,

  My penny Panorama of the Lord Mayor’s Show.

  Mere river-side excursions were indulged in at any time, the steamer trip to Greenwich and back being the usual one. For the boys, of course, not me. All I culled from them was a new chant for my play: ‘Ease her, back her, stop her’, and the longer instructions: ‘When in danger with no room to turn, ease her, stop her, go astern’, and ‘When you see three lights ahead, port your helm and show your red’.

  Nowadays it is difficult to realize that no Christmas preparations were made until the week before the day itself. All our excitement was packed into a short space. The boys were on holiday, and all over the place. Mother was mostly in the kitchen, presiding over mincemeat and puddings. I was set to clean currants, squeeze lemons, and cut up candied peel. Barnholt lent a hand at chopping the suet, but kept making raids on the lumps of sugar tucked away in the candied peel, which he assured me were very hard and nasty in the mincemeat, but had no ill effects on him.

  Tom and Dym kept going to Upper Street to get stationery, cards, and presents from the shops. Charles spent his time in painting home-made Christmas cards. Midday dinner was a noisy buzz of comparing notes on the morning’s doings, and having a look at what Charles had produced. The afternoons were generally given up to the preparation of our annual play. It fell to Tom to devise the plot, and to Charles, the Bully Bottom of the family, fell nearly everything else. He took the part of the villain or the comic washerwoman, and kept thinking up ideas for improving the parts of the others. He taught me how to act when I wasn’t speaking, how to listen with agitation, how to do ‘by-play’, how to swoon, and once even how to die. Dym was usually the hero, a bit stiff, but always dignified. Barnholt had to be given a part with little to say, because, however willing, he could not be relied on to remember the words, or improvise other ones. He would be a coachman or a footman, or perhaps only the scene-shifter. What he really loved was to be the policeman, coming in at the crisis with a ‘’Ere, what’s all this?’, pulling out his notebook, wetting his thumb, and taking people’s addresses. He knew his stuff for this perfectly, but it wouldn’t always fit into melodrama.

  Tom, to my great comfort, was prompter, and saved me from many a breakdown when I was swamped with nervousness. I didn’t actually forget my words, but I should have done if Tom hadn’t stood by smiling at me behind the screen.

  Christmas Eve was the day we liked best. The morning was a frenzied rush for last rehearsals, last posting of cards, last buying of presents. My father came home early, laden with parcels. The tea-table was resplendent with bon-bons (crackers), sweets, and surprise cakes with icing on the top and threepenny-bits inside. The usual ‘bread and butter first’ rule was set aside, and we all ate and talked and laughed to our heart’s content.

  Then followed the solemn ascent to the study for the play. The boys had borrowed chairs from the bedrooms, and placed them in two rows: the front (stalls) for father, mother, and any aunt, uncle, or visitor who happened to be there, and the back (pit) for the servants, who attended with much gigglement.

  Personally I was thankful when this nerve-strain was over, and we all crowded down into the breakfast-parlour. Here, earlier in the day, mother and I had arranged the presents—a little pile for each, and we all fell upon them with delight. We were never fussed up with a Christmas tree or stockings or make-believe about Santa Claus. Perhaps we were too hard-headed. Perhaps mother considered that waking up in the small hours to look at stockings was a bad beginning for an exciting day. As it was, we had nice time before bed for peeping into our new books, and gloating over all the fresh treasures.

  Christmas Day itself followed a regular ritual. Service at St. Paul’s was exactly the same as it is now, the same hymns and even the same decorations (knots of red velvet hung on the pillars). The post was the next excitement, and we displayed our cards on the mantelpiece. The traditional dinner of turkey and plum pudding and dessert was followed by a comatose afternoon, during which Barnholt cooked chestnuts incessantly on the bars of the grate, tossing them to us as they were done.

  The evening festivities began with the ceremony of punch-making. This was always my father’s special job, and he spread himself over it royally. Quantities of loaf sugar and lemons were assembled, and a very large glass jug. A kettle of water was on the fire. The lemon-juice and sugar were stirred together at the bottom of the jug, then a tumblerful each of rum and brandy were added. Carefully my father then filled the jug with boiling water. Carefully, because once the boiling water smashed the jug, and everything splashed over the dining-room table. He
laughed and called for all the ingredients over again. ‘We’ve lost the punch,’ said he, ‘we needn’t also lose a bit of our lives by crying over it.’

  IV. Sailing Near the Wind

  ‘NOTHING peculiar happened today.’ Such is the entry again and again in my first diary, a large ‘Renshaw’ for 1876, presented by my father, filled in with anxious care, and preserved even till today. The main ‘care’ was that events being so few I was driven to record even the fact of going to bed. My outside amusements were mainly pale reflections of what the boys told me about theirs. The Agricultural Hall was within easy reach of us, and I wondered what the boys found so attractive in a place with such a name. Of course I was never allowed to go there myself, but gathered that it was not all concerned with farming and cattle and pigs. At one time a man named Weston used to walk round and round the Hall to see how long he could keep it up. This seemed to me a foolish game, but the boys liked to watch him, especially when he had ten minutes’ rest, and fell asleep in the arms of his attendants.

  Far more exciting to me were the accounts the boys brought home from the Polytechnic. The name had a gayer sound, and here there was a Diving-Bell. You went into a little room inside a big bell, and were let down into water. So they said, but of course I didn’t believe it. However, it sounded a delightful take-in, and I used to shout about the house, ‘This way for the Diving-Bell.’ Dym took the trouble to show me, with the aid of a tumbler, a rag, and a pail of water, how the diving-bell worked. I was amazed, but still unbelieving that people would trust themselves to go under water just because a rag in a tumbler managed somehow to keep dry.