Portrait of Elmbury Read online

  JOHN MOORE

  Portrait of Elmbury

  Contents

  Confession

  Part One

  Through the Window

  Part Two

  Background to Boyhood

  Part Three

  Going, Going

  Part Four

  The Uneasy Peace

  Part Five

  The Chimes at Midnight

  Part Six

  Indian Summer

  Confession

  “Elmbury” is a real place in the sense that I have taken as it were the ground-plan of a real town and built somewhat freely upon it. Likewise this account of the fortunes of its people in the years between the wars is built upon a framework of truth; but I haven’t hesitated to alter names, to play tricks with time and geography, and where necessary to import one or two original and purely imaginary wrongdoers in cases where a selection from among our ready-made “Elmbury” ones might have resulted in an action for libel.

  Part One

  Through the Window

  (1913-1918)

  Background to Childhood—Punch and Judy Show—Beauty in Ugliness—“Fields Flocks Flowers”—A Vision of Piers Plowman—Missed Opportunities—Odd-job Man’s Delight— English Eccentrics—The Bourgeois at Play—The Bourgeois at Work—Gallery of Relations—The Colonel—Faces at the Window —Hopscotch, Hoops, Hobbly-’onkers—Pistol, Bardolph and Nym— The Town Scoundrels—Oyez! Oyez!—Passing Acquaintances— The Mystery of Fred—Christmas Fair—Elmbury Goes to War

  Background to Childhood

  The loveliest house in Elmbury, which was called Tudor House, looked out across a wide main street upon the filthiest slum I have ever set eyes on in England. Few people saw anything incongruous in this, for in those days Elmbury was a higgledy-piggledy place, of incomparable beauty and incomparable squalor, and its inhabitants had retained something of the spirit of the Elizabethans, who could enjoy Hamlet in the interval between an afternoon at the bear-pit and a visit to the brothel, when both bear-pit and brothel lay within a stone’s throw of the theatre.

  In Tudor House I spent most of my early childhood. That is literally true, for apart from brief formal “walks” with Old Nanny we didn’t go out much, and since I was erroneously supposed to be “not very strong” I was always in the condition of having a cold, of having had a cold, or of being liable to catch a cold if I got wet. So Tudor House was my world; and with its winding staircases, its dark oak-panelled corridors, its numerous exciting junk-rooms and attics, and its curious and delightful back-garden, it provided a domain wide enough for any small boy.

  The garden, especially, was a child’s paradise. It was not too big, so that we knew every stick and stone of it; and since it was by no means a source of pride either to our parents or to the occasional odd-jobbing gardener, we could do whatever we liked in it without reproof. Moreover, it had an unique and thrilling smell, a sort of jungle-smell made up, I suppose, of damp rotting leaves, wet sandstone walls, a stagnant well, and dead cats in the nearby river: you would scarcely term it a fragrance, but we loved it, somehow we associated it with adventure and mysterious things.

  No doubt the extraordinarily high walls were the cause of the garden being so damp. One of these was provided by a Drill Hall wherein the local Volunteers ineffectually paraded once a week; another, of tremendous size, unscalable even by cats, was a bastion against our next-door neighbours: it need have been no bigger if the Picts and the Scots had been encamped on the other side of it. The third wall, most unnecessarily, shut out the slow river, with its barges, its rowing-boats, and its immobile patient fishermen. A great oaken door, however, which creaked terrifyingly like that which gives entrance to the home of the omnipotent gods, opened on reluctant hinges to these delights.

  The high walls, which seemed to cloister the garden rather than to imprison it, were in themselves extremely beautiful. One of them was made of Old Red Sandstone, and the other two of that pinkish-orange Georgian brick which becomes almost incandescent and glows with an inward light when the sun shines on it. The Drill Hall was covered with Virginia Creeper, its leaves redder than robins’ breasts in autumn. The wall-against-the-neighbours was hung with ivy, a dusty hiding-place for sparrows’ nests, for small yellow moths, and for those big downy brown ones called Old Ladies. The river wall, of weathered sandstone, was a background to the most delightful herbaceous border imaginable, a small-scale jungle in which peonies, stocks, marigolds and red-hot pokers fought for life, and out of which triumphantly rose great hollyhocks and even more gigantic sunflowers, a few of which each season topped the wall and, having looked towards the Promised Land, bowed their heads towards it and contentedly died.

  For the rest, the garden possessed one climbable tree, a laburnum, seasonally weeping golden rain; a bush of white lilac; a sort of shrubbery about five yards square, just big enough for one thrush’s nest each spring; white jasmine on an outhouse wall; a small wicket-scarred lawn; a “sand-pit” in which we children were supposed to play (but we had better games); and a disused well, with an old ramshackle wooden cover to it, which we believed to be the entrance to a monks’ secret passage.

  Above the garden towered the big house. Its “backs” were as beautiful as its façade. You went up some wide, semi-circular stone steps on to a flagged courtyard around which stood the half-timbered building, whitewashed between its sepia oak beams. The back-door was a tremendous piece of oak, studded with nails, with a knocker heavy enough to wake the dead; there were strange scars on the oak as if someone with an axe had tried to force his way in. Inside there was a sudden cool darkness of stone-floored corridors, sculleries, pantries and whatnot, and then the spice-scented kitchen with Old Cookie, if she were sober, busy over her pots and pans. Then you came to the hall, its panelled walls hung with brass ladles, a curious form of decoration (but pictures would have looked cold and lonely against the dark oak); then, off the hall, the drawing-room, very long and light, with big windows and a pale oak parquet floor—the walls abounding in more brass ladles, in copper warming-pans, shelves of pewter tankards, cabinets of valuable china, a housemaid’s nightmare; and then the dining-room, as cosily dark as the drawing-room was airily-bright, with the royal coat-of-arms (we never knew why) carved above the mantelpiece.

  There was also a fair-sized room with white enamelled walls, called “the day nursery,” which had a comfortable window-seat beneath its leaded windows, looking out on to the main street. This was the place where my sister and I were most often to be found, with our noses pressed close to the diamond-shaped panes, gazing out with lively interest and eager anticipation at the black and gaping maw of Double Alley, which was the name of the slum opposite us. Some of the panes had queer distorting whorls in them, so that from certain angles Double Alley was double indeed; and others were cloudy with a mysterious pinkish cloudiness, imparting to objects seen through them an unearthly flush. Tinted thus, the entrance to the alley, with the usual quarrelsome and gesticulating figures standing about it, was not unlike the yawning jaws of a medieval hell.

  Punch and Judy Show

  Indeed, even among Elmbury’s slums, Double Alley was something to be wondered at. Respectable women drew their skirts closer about them as they passed its nauseous opening; even the doctor and the priest were unwilling adventurers on the rare occasions when they were summoned to visit it; and policemen, who were more frequent visitors, took care to go in pairs when their duties took them there.

  One of the most extraordinary things about Double Alley was that little children who lived within it would run about naked, in the full light of day. This served to sharpen the impression which the place gave to strangers, that it was populated by fiends.

  We children had no suc
h illusion. We knew very well that the inhabitants of Double Alley were flesh-and-blood. (The blood, indeed, was only too evident on Saturday nights.) Their too-human frailties were daily manifested to us. We knew the names, the relationships, and a large part of the life-histories of almost all that piteous riff-raff. The ragged women, the drunken men, the screaming wanton wenches, the rickety children, were more real to us than many of our relations; far more real than the visitors in evening clothes who came to dine with our parents and afterwards played the piano, and sang, in the drawing-room. We never had much use for such singing; but when Nobbler Price came home from the pub roaring and bellowing we thoroughly appreciated the entertainment. It was very much better than When Lady Betty Walks Abroad or Melisande.

  A fair example of Double Alley’s inhabitants would be Mr. and Mrs. Hook. The domestic disagreements of this hot-tempered couple always took place coram populo, at the street entrance to the Alley, instead of in the decent seclusion of their own hovel; not through any exhibitionism, I suppose, but simply because, for fighting on the scale practised by them, their hovel was not big enough. We had learned, from nurse-maid’s or servant’s gossip, enough of Mr. and Mrs. Hook’s affairs to be able to reconstruct the course of their quarrels, which much resembled that of a Punch and Judy show. Mr. Hook would return, lurching and staggering, from his festivities, and Mrs. Hook, hearing his approach or being warned of it, would rush out to greet him with blows and blasphemy; and in a confused flurry of attack and counter-attack they would disappear together into the alley’s dark maw. There followed an interval during which it might be supposed Mr. Hook slept, while his wife providently abstracted what remained of his week’s pay from his pockets. Then Mr. Hook would wake up, remember an important appointment at the George, and discover that he was penniless. His enormous bellow of rage was the signal for Mrs. Hook to run helter-skelter down the alley to take up station in their traditional battleground at its entrance. There among the chattering anticipatory neighbours she would await, with arms akimbo, the terrible coming of her outraged lord. Again it was just like Punch and Judy. Whang!—Mrs. Hook clouted him on the side of the head. Bonk!—Mr. Hook countered with a left to the jaw. And so it went on, until some spoil-sport fetched a policeman. (Punch and Judy again, you see; these disputants invariably observed the formality and the tradition.) But to the two peaky-faced children who watched with their noses glued to the window it was better than any Punch and Judy show: it was the first taste of real life.

  There were others, more colourful if less violent than the Hooks, who took part in this daily pageant which might almost have been staged for our special benefit. (At least we had seats in the front row of the stalls.) There was, for instance, Black Sal. She was mad, she was frequently drunk, and she never washed. When the frenzy was upon her, or when she was full of gin, she would range about the town chanting meaningless obscenities; at other times she practised a kind of coarse and friendly banter, a running commentary upon life and affairs, addressed to all and sundry, but particularly to the mayor, as she waddled down the middle of the street. These comments were generally expressed in rough and ready rhymes, or in the assonances which modern poets use, which gave them added point. “Wot’s the Town Council but a lot of scoundrels?” she would ask; and there were few found willing to answer her. “The Mayor has banquets, we ain’t got no blankets,” she would declare. All the time she threw quips and jeers over her shoulder as the respectable top-floor windows were opened and the respectable householders peered out. “Ho! ho! ho!” she would cry. “Ships yuds is chip this morning!” Sheep’s heads were symbols of stupidity: thus she reproved the inquisitive who so rudely stared at her. She would sing, too, improvising as she went along:

  “Black Sal,

  Jolly old gal,

  What do the Doctor say?

  He wants to put her away.

  Poor Black Sal,

  Poor old gal!”

  It was related of her, in later years, that she died two deaths. The first occurred in her own home, and when the breath had ceased in her, her husband brought out a bottle of gin and shared it with some of the neighbours, either to celebrate his release from her or to sustain him in his loss. It is recorded that as he poured out the drink he glanced at the corpse upon the bed and remarked, sententiously: “Black Sal, thee’s sarved me many a trick in thy time but never thee’s sarved me a trick like this.” But Black Sal, half-way to Gehenna, smelled the gin, hastened back, and finished the bottle. After this first death she survived for many years, until at last, becoming destitute, she was taken to the workhouse where among other indignities she suffered that of being forcibly washed. This killed her: and the chilly hard-hearted Institution provided no bottle of gin to lure her back to life.

  Her appearance, in the days when she dwelt in the filthiest cottage of all Double Alley, was horrific in the extreme. She wore a black bonnet, a black shawl, and a black ragged skirt; her bonnet, which was tall, elaborate and decorated with black feathers, gave her the overdressed appearance of a witch on holiday, one of the Weird Sisters gone galivanting. Her face was almost as black as her clothes. When I began to learn Greek I thought of the Eumenides as Black Sals; but in spite of her frightful appearance, we children never feared her nor imagined that there was anything malevolent about her. She was just another character in the pageant; and when we met her in the street we said “Good-morning, Black Sal,” and she answered politely, “Mornin’, Master John … Mornin’, Miss Daphne.”

  One more Hogarthian figure, and then I have done with them. Nobbler Price did not actually inhabit Double Alley, but kept a tiny greengrocer’s shop nearby; he also possessed a weedy patch of back garden, abutting on the alley, and a miserable-looking nannygoat which was tethered to a peg and which demonstrated by its circumscribed nibbling the great truths discovered by Euclid and Pythagoras.

  When Nobbler was drunk, he became maniacal. I saw him once careering down the street in his pony-cart, whipping his wretched little pony into a canter, while two stout policemen hung on to the bridle; and when they seemed likely to slow him up he picked up his mongrel dog that rode in the cart beside him and shied it with remarkable accuracy at the nearest policeman’s head. It was Nobbler’s chief obsession, when he was drunk, that he wanted to shoot his wife, of whom in sober moments he was extremely fond; but while with drunken clumsiness he searched for his shotgun, she would take shelter at a neighbour’s house, where she remained until his fit passed. On one of these occasions, in frustrated rage, being determined to shoot something, Nobbler went out into his back garden and shot the nannygoat.

  Yet when he was dead, many years later, Mrs. Price told me, with tears in her eyes, “I miss him. … Yes, I miss Nobbler. You see, sir, he was so good to I.”

  And indeed the poor demented creature had his good qualities. Between bouts, he behaved to man and beast with the greatest gentleness; he was capable of strong loyalties and deep affections. He worshipped my father (who was often called to quieten him when he was drunk), and after my father’s death, when the lovely house had been sold to be turned into an hotel, Nobbler and his wife became for a time its caretakers. It stood empty for months, and once a week—every Sunday morning—Nobbler would walk two miles to bring my mother a draggled nosegay, of peonies, columbines, stocks and marigolds, from the herbaceous border against the sandstone wall.

  Beauty in Ugliness

  The appalling incongruity between our tall, beautiful house and the squat cavernous alley opposite; between our parents’ smooth-flowing and contented lives and the drunken brawls across the street; between our spoiled and rather pampered upbringing and the ribby nakedness of the slum children: all this sounds very shocking now. But it was part of a larger incongruity with which we grew up, scarcely noticing it: the extraordinary higgledy-pigglediness, the rich seething hotch-potch of a thousand ingredients, which was Elmbury itself. Elmbury was a small town, and such are generally supposed to be dull, and to be associated with aspidistras, and to i
nfect the souls of their inhabitants with something mean and crabbed and petty, with ignorant “provincialism,” and with something specially reprehensible and circumscribed called a “small-town mentality.” But Elmbury wasn’t like that at all. It had infinite variety. It was splendid and it was sordid; but it certainly wasn’t dull.

  Over it and dominating it rose the huge square tower of the Abbey: the finest Norman tower, some say, in the world. The Abbey itself, bigger than many cathedrals, loomed vastly out of its churchyard chestnuts and yews. But there was none of that “odour of sanctity,” which usually belongs to cathedral closes, about the immediate neighbourhood of Elmbury’s great church: no cloistered quietude, nothing sanctimonious or grave. Outside the churchyard gates the main road ran north to Birmingham and south to Bristol, and up and down it the heedless traffic flowed. Just across the road, exactly opposite the church, was a good, solid, half-timbered pub; it had a garden hedged with thick impenetrable yews, a secret place hidden from prying eyes, where old men played bowls till the light faded and younger folk played more mischievous games in the twilight. But adjoining this delightful garden (at the bottom of which a willowy stream flowed) was a large horrible red-brick building like a public lavatory; this was the grammar school. And beyond it was an untidy-looking rubbish dump, a noisome wilderness into which the town’s sewage was discharged, loved only by rats and terriers and crows and little boys.

  At the other side of the Abbey things were equally chaotic. There were more pubs—small squalid ones with spit-and-sawdust bars. There were Elizabethan almhouses, enchanting but scarcely habitable, which American tourists always wanted to buy, lock, stock, and barrel, so that they could carry them home, as explorers’ trophies, to the States. There were tumbledown cottages, dirty and overcrowded, with whole families sleeping in one small bedroom; roses in their pretty little front gardens, bugs in their beds. There was a dreadful “Italian Tea Garden” with umbrellas like striped mushrooms shading the tables on the lawn. There were shops which sold trivial souvenirs to visitors. There were allotments, smelling of dead cabbages and live pigs. And there was a pleasant cricket-field, margined by willows and cressy streams, its green turf hallowed by the feet of W. G. Grace who once played there, its pavilion roof still bearing honourable scars from the big hits of Gilbert Jessop.