Sometimes mother and I went by tram, but the horse affair was so slow, the waiting for it so long, and the stoppings so frequent, that the walkers reached Aldersgate before we did. Occasionally my father would vary the route home by taking us through the deserted City, free of all traffic, and showing us Austin Friars and funny little passages, till we came to Broad Street and thence back to Canonbury by train.
How cool and vast the cathedral seemed after the dusty streets! We walked with precision to our special seats, for the vergers knew us well. My father had a stall, my brothers sat in a pew beyond the choir, my mother and I sat in the reserved front row under the dome. The cathedral seemed to belong to us, and little took place that escaped the notice of one or other of us.
My back still aches in memory of those long services. Nothing was spared us—the whole of the ‘Dearly beloved’, never an omission of the Litany, always the full ante-Communion Service, involving a sermon of unbelievable length. The seats and kneeling-boards were constructed for grown-ups (and not too comfortable for them), and a child had the greatest difficulty in keeping an upright kneeling position all through the long intoned Litany. We found some alleviations even here. How would the officiating priest take the fence in intoning ‘uncharitableness’? Canon Milman was our delight over this, because he used to quaver forth ‘-table-’ all by itself and leave a long pause of suspense before he could reach the high note of ‘-ness’. After this we looked forward to beating down Satan under our feet, partly because it seemed a nice final thing to do, and partly because it was the half-way mark. Some energetic clergymen put in extra prayers at the end, even the thanksgiving—always associated with my blackest thoughts.
Like all children I put some kind of workable meaning into the strange Prayer Book phrases. ‘The Scripture moveth us in sundry places’ must mean that it pokes us in various parts of our body—a spiritual dig in the ribs: ‘Come now, own up.’
‘Deal not with us after our sins’ was surely a foolish request. Mother’s indignant refusal to ‘deal with’ the butcher was her last word of annoyance, and why should we go out of our way to pray for such treatment? Still more idiotic did it seem to pray, ‘Neither reward us after our iniquities.’ If God was so generously inclined, why prevent him? As for asking him to rule the Church in the right way, that was mere impertinence. Surely he could be trusted to do it rightly!
Curiously enough I did actually seek enlightenment on two difficulties. Walking home with Barnholt I asked him what ‘begotten’ meant. He wasn’t quite sure, but thought it was pretty much the same as ‘forgotten’. I was satisfied, and never pushed any farther, concluding that to be the only one ‘forgotten’ was just one of those odd things that happened to Jesus. The other difficulty was a sin mentioned in the Litany as being a ‘deadly’ one. On this point I approached mother. In a sudden burst of confidence worthy of Micawber, she told me that she had puzzled over this herself. Enough. Why worry, when even grown-ups didn’t know?
On the few occasions that they chanted the Athanasian Creed I suffered much. Not from the Creed itself, which was a change and amused me, but from mother’s attitude. She insisted on sitting through it in a marked manner, not as though she were feeling a little faint or something, but bolt upright with firmly shut mouth, to show her disapproval. Might Heaven itself send some vague punishment? Or, still worse, would the verger speak to her?
I have wondered since those days why we all took those long walks through dull streets, and endured those long services. Not from pious or educative motives. It must have been simply for the inspiriting music that burst from that organ and that choir. It was worth all the endurance, even of the Litany. No footling sentimental hymns, but Te Deums, Psalms, Creeds, Introits, and Kyries that intoxicated us. During one boy’s solo my father was so excited that his fist came thump down on his neighbour’s shoulder. We children knew all the chants, and used often at home to converse loudly to their times. We had nicknames for our favourite Creeds. There was the ‘trumpet’ Creed, with six trumpet-notes on the organ before each section. We could rely on getting this on the great Feast days. Another was called the ‘cup of tea’ Creed, because the recurring theme was just the same as that of a comic song of the time, running:
First you take and warm your teapot, let your water boiling be,
That’s a most important secret, and see you do not spare the tea.
Sermons, of course, were on the endurance side, but had some alleviations. I had a nice long sit down, and as I was always seated close to the pulpit I enjoyed the colours of the marble pillars, and could weave fancies round the Punjaub, a funny name to have on a pulpit. If the preacher grew fierce I looked at the statue of Samveli Johnson, whom I vaguely connected with Sam Weller, and if he were gentle I looked at the one of Howard with his keys, a satisfying face and figure. It is curious that during all those years I never inquired who these people were. The sermons were seldom less than three-quarters of an hour. To the preacher it was the chance of a lifetime. He would never again ‘address London’. We got to be a little sorry for him as he went up the steps, conducted by the melancholy-looking verger who certainly must have given him a gloomy foreboding of his reception by ‘London’. He did not know how his voice would carry under the dome, and we took joy in seeing whether he would bawl, or roar like any sucking dove.
During the summer months we had a series of colonial bishops, who told us all they had ever thought in their far-flung places. The only man we ever heard more than once was the Dean, who always preached on the great Feast days, and let us off with half an hour. The only sermon of his that I recall was a Christmas one, when he besought us to enjoy ourselves, dinner and all, because that was what the Lord would like best. ‘A sprig of withered parsley’ was the description of Dean Church by some wit of the day. He was a very slight, care-worn-looking man, ending the procession into the service, letting his board hang listlessly from his hand, mounting into his stall with a semi-detached air, as if the whole business was of little concern. For some reason we had boundless respect for him, and liked to hear him read the Gospel, in which the only word he ever emphasized was ‘and’. The effect of this, strangely enough, was to give extraordinary dignity to the narrative of the passion.
The sermons were usually stiff with learning and far over our heads. After one on Solomon’s vision, I asked Barnholt on the way home whether he would have chosen wisdom if he had been Solomon. ‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘I’ve got enough of that. I should have asked for a new cricket-bat.’ The rest of the walk home was spent in enlarging on the things we might have got from such a golden opportunity.
Dinner-time on Sunday was the occasion for us all to compare notes and criticisms of the voices of canon, minor canon, and preacher, and the shade of ritualism of the stranger. Whether he stood at the north end of the altar, or in the middle—it was a burning question in those days, when clergymen were being imprisoned for Romish practices. We had no feelings in the matter, but we loved to see someone sailing near the wind.
The afternoons hung heavy. It seemed to be always 3 o’clock. All amusements, as well as work, were forbidden. It was a real privation not to be allowed to draw and paint. However, an exception was made in favour of illuminated texts, and we rivalled the old monks in our zeal for copying Scripture, with the same kind of worldly decorations that they devised.
Naturally our main stand-by was reading, but here again our field was limited by mother’s notions of what was appropriate for Sunday. Tom Brown, Robinson Crusoe, Hans Andersen’s Tales, and Pilgrim’s Progress were permitted, but not the Arabian Nights, or Walter Scott, or indeed any novel. We had to fall back on bound volumes of Good Words for the Young, which were not so bad as the title suggests, and contained plenty of stories. Again and again I turned to something entitled The Dark Journey, only to find that it was an account of one’s digestion. You may wonder why I did this more than once, but I always hoped that I had been mistaken, and that such a splendid title must mean a good sto
ry. No, there was still that forbidding picture of one’s insides cut through the middle.
We all liked certain parts of a three-volume story called Henry Milner, which purported to be an account of the upbringing of a Christian gentleman. I believe he never did anything wrong, but his school-fellows did, and all their gay activities shone like misdeeds in a pious world.
The Bible proved often more entertaining than the ‘good’ books. One day when Barnholt was desperate for a new story I recommended Esther as being as good as the Arabian Nights. He hung back, however, until I urged the point that God was not mentioned in it. ‘No, really?’ he cried, seized the Bible, and soon became absorbed in the plot. He and I used to gloat too over the horrors of the Revelation, more than over its brighter passages. One thing puzzled us: when the twenty-four elders had cast down their crowns, what happened next? Did they run and pick them up again to throw them down again, or were new crowns supplied to them?
Religious talk was seldom, if ever, inflicted on us. The question of conscience once arose when mother was reading Jessica’s First Prayer aloud to Barnholt and me. ‘What means by conscience?’ said I. ‘Surely,’ mother replied in rather shocked tones, ‘you have heard the voice of God speaking to you, and telling you not to do what is wrong?’ Scenting danger, I hastily agreed. ‘And you too, Barnholt, of course?’ ‘No,’ said he, ‘I’ve never heard any voice at all.’ Mother pressed him, asserting that he must have heard it. But he stuck to his point, and how I admired him, and wished I had had the courage to say the same, because I had never heard anything either.
Sunday newspapers did exist, but were not respectable. How horrified my father was on discovering that the servants had been reading little bits to me out of Lloyd’s Weekly! He gave me to understand that I must never read it because the small print was so bad for me. Now and again, however, I noticed on a Sunday walk that he bought a paper. For sometimes my father would cut out all church-going and announce, ‘Let’s go up to Hampstead Heath to see the sun shine.’ We never gave him time to change his mind, or mother’s conscience a chance to get to work about Sunday travelling, but were soon hustling oft with him to the station. Yes, the sun was shining on the heath sure enough, and we scampered about the wild paths that stretch beneath the group of firs by the Spaniards. Fifty years have made little difference to that scene. I think the very bench under the trees is the same, but the country lane that led to Highgate has been civilized into villadom and a good run for cars. Down Highgate Hill we ran, always paying our respects to Dick Whittington’s stone on the way, took a tram along Holloway, and reached home with the appetites of hunters.
Sometimes when the weather was particularly bad, or we had friends who jibbed at the long way to St. Paul’s, we went to a church near by. Like most Londoners, we had no idea as to a parish church, but chose the one we liked best. Needless to say, this was one where the service was not intolerably dull. In fact we chose one that was considered dangerously ‘high’, where they ‘did things’. I heard a neighbour say to mother in awful undertones (so that I should not hear), ‘My dear Mrs. Thomas, they say he has a confessional.’ Liturgical colours on the altar, Byzantine paintings on the walls, Gregorian chants, Communion more than once a month—all pointed to Rome. We children enjoyed this danger-zone and hoped that incense would be started. Charles declared he smelt it one day, but then his imagination always outran fact.
So mumbling and queer was the old vicar’s delivery that he seemed to have hot potatoes in his mouth, and none but his usual congregation could understand him. One of his sermons had a local touch and sticks in my memory. Apparently Ahab, in addition to his ordinary misdoings, had (in some obscure part of the Bible) built himself an ivory palace. This was definitely wrong, and modern men of business who were similarly extravagant would come to a similar bad end. ‘You successful merchants, who build unto yourselves your ivory palaces in Highbury New Park….’ This puzzled me, because I knew that road from end to end, and had never noticed a house at all resembling an ivory palace. The way to escape the fate of Ahab was to place your offerings ‘in the box that you will find at the door’. Charles imitated the vicar so well and so often that the joke lost its edge, but a cousin came to stay with us and supposed him to be exaggerating. When she attended the church with us, however, and the old fellow began his mouthing, she had to go hurriedly into the churchyard to let loose her laughter.
The vicar’s wife paid us an occasional call, frightening me with her severity, for she wore the black cloak and hood of a nun. She said that it saved her having to think about a new dress. Mother, full of daring, attacked her one day on the sameness of her husband’s sermons. She agreed that they were monotonous, and advised mother to meditate instead of listening. ‘That’s what I do myself,’ she added. She sat in church just like other people, so I longed to ask, ‘What means by meditate?’, but was too overawed to ask until she had gone. The severe bearing of this man and wife hid, and had perhaps caused, a tragedy. An only child, a son, the apple of their eye, was destined for Holy Orders. But he did something disgraceful—either was seen drunk, or joined the Salvation Army, or married an impossible girl, or something. Mother’s common sense might have blown away the trouble, but she had a horror of poking into other people’s business unless asked. All we knew was that the boy had been forbidden to come home, and a letter to him was returned to the Post Office marked ‘Not known here’. There was something dreadfully final about this, and when his poor mother told us about it she broke through her stony reserve and sobbed piteously.
There were plenty of other places of worship round the neighbourhood which the boys sampled now and then, for the sake of variety—most of them very low church, or ‘crawling’ as they called it. My father said he didn’t care where they went as long as it wasn’t a ‘schism shop’, by which he meant anything nonconforming. However, when Moody and Sankey were making news everywhere, mother felt a great impulse to see what it was all about. There was a meeting arranged quite near, at the Agricultural Hall I think, and off she went. Her report to the family was that everything was ‘too exposed’, and she had been horribly afraid that Mr. Moody would point his finger at her and ask some intimate question, or invite her to sit on the converts’ bench. So she got away as soon as possible, bringing with her a fat hymn-book. Charles found this most attractive for rendering in his own fashion on the piano, and one day we found ourselves dancing a polka heartily to the tune of ‘Hold the Fort’.
My father’s Sunday efforts weakened towards evening, and after tea he liked to read aloud to us from books that sounded quite well, but afforded some chance of frivolity. Of course Shakespeare is Shakespeare, but we got boisterous joy out of Falstaff and his men in buckram, out of Hotspur’s contempt for Glendower, and Fluellen’s brush with Pistol over the leek. Ingoldsby Legends were always in demand, and above all the Misadventures at Margate, which we knew almost by heart. I took my cue from the boys and laughed whenever they did, but it was not till much later in life that I perceived the humour of what was read. Never mind, I was led to welcome a joke as though it were a jewel, and the mere habit has made life jollier. One thing over which they laughed did, however, worry me. The closing couplet of the Margate poem was so easy to understand, and so silly. How could anyone be so foolish as to ring a bell, have the door answered, and then have nothing to say but that a friend of his was pretty well?
Pickwick Papers, by some blessed workings of mother’s conscience, did not come under the head of novels. They were ‘papers’. She herself led the laughter over the long gamekeeper and Bob Sawyer’s supper-party. Not sabbatical by any means, but those readings rescued our childhood’s Sundays from the grimness that might otherwise have stuck to them. And often my father would read us things that he loved, without a single word of ‘explanation’. Of these the Ancient Mariner stands out beyond the rest. O happy living things! Why do people murder them by explanations?
VIII. Callers
LONDONERS have no neighbours.
During our fifteen years in the one house we never had the slightest acquaintance with our ‘semi-detached’, nor with the people round, although we knew several by sight and gave them nicknames. A very few became known to us through the vicar, the schoolmaster, and the doctor.
The doctor himself was a dear. He saw us through all our infectious diseases and coughs, curing most of our ailments more by jollity than physic. He was specially fond of me because, as he frequently said, he had saved my life. I had almost gone with measles, and when hope had practically departed he ordered champagne. I was only six years old, but I remember that champagne, and my father bringing it to me in his shirt-sleeves that hot summer evening. The very word ‘champagne’, connected as it was with festivity, and my father’s face all smiles, put new life into me, and gave me kick enough to pull through. But I took ages to recover, and can remember the excitement of my first day out of bed, wrapped in a shawl and allowed to sit in my window.
Most of our illnesses mother managed by herself. Sir William Gull, whom she had known intimately, told her that he always gave a patient what he asked for, even sherry in high fever if he wanted it, because a man’s stomach and appetite were the best guides. On this simple principle we were not pressed to swallow arrowroot and other horrors, but allowed to starve until we called out for something.
So few were our demands on the doctor that he used to pay mother unofficial calls, in the middle of his morning rounds. To cheer himself up, I fancy. These visits were glory for me because they broke into my morning’s work and gave me a chance to hear juicier bits than the ordinary visitor provided. The mysterious undertone would excite me and impress my memory far more than a matter-of-fact style.
‘You have no idea, Mrs. Thomas, how many ladies I attend whose only malady is secret bottles.’
A London Child of the Seventies Page 8
