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Authors: V.S. Pritchett

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“The troops stay so late,” sniggered Mr Drake. “How can a working girl get to work?”

As the day’s work went on, the foremen in leather aprons would come over to the office from the warehouse. They were responsible for different kinds of leather and they usually came over to settle matters arising from the chief problem of the leather trade. Most of it is sold by weight, but leather can gain or lose weight, depending upon the season and the weather. The men in the warehouse despised the “shiny arsed clerks with their four ten a week.” Sometimes Bermondsey life would break in on us. The kids would climb up the wall and, hanging on to the bars of the office windows, would jeer at us. A clerk would be sent to drive them off, but they picked up stones and threw them at him or spattered our windows with horse manure. But often the clerk could not get out because they had tied up the door with rope. If a boy was caught and got his ears boxed, the mother would be round in a
minute, standing in the office and shouting she wanted “the bleeding fucker” who had hit her Ernie. The mothers were often hanging about in the pub next door, feeding their babies stout or a drop of port to keep them sleepy.

We worked until seven in the evening. On Saturdays we left between two and four, this depending on the mail. In the evenings I went home from London Bridge Station. In
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot wrote of the strange morning and evening sight of those thousands of men, all wearing bowlers and carrying umbrellas, crossing London Bridge in long, dull regiments and pouring into that ugly, but to me most affecting, railway station which for years I used. I was captivated by it as I suppose every office worker is by the station in the great city that rules his life. Penn Station in New York, St Lazare in Paris, Waterloo, Paddington and Liverpool Street, are printed on the pages of a lifetime’s grind at the office desk. Each is a quotidian frontier, splitting a life, a temple of the inexorable. The distinction of London Bridge Station, on the Chatham side, is that it is not a terminus but a junction where lives begin to fade and then blossom again as they swap trains in the rush hours and make for all the regions of South London and the towns of Kent. The trains come in and go out over those miles of rolling brick arches that run across South London like a massive Roman wall. There were no indicators on the platforms in my day and the confusion had to be sorted out by stentorian porters who called out the long litanies of stations in a hoarse London bawl and with a style of their own. They stood on the crowded platform edge, detected the identifying lights on the incoming engine and then sang out. To myself, at that age, all places I did not know seemed romantic and the lists of names were, if not Miltonic, at any rate as evocative as those names with which the Georgian poets filled up their lines. I would stare admiringly, even enviously, at the porter who would have to chant the long line to Bexley Heath; or the man who, beginning with the blunt and challenging football names of Charlton and Woolwich would go on to comic Plumstead and then flow forward over his long list till his voice fell to the finality of Greenhythe, Northfleet and Gravesend; or the softer tones of St Johns, Lewisham and Blackheath. And to stir us up were the powerful trains—travelling to distances that seemed as
remote as Istanbul to me—expresses that went to Margate, Herne Bay, Rochester and Chatham. I saw nothing dingy in this. The pleasure of my life as an office boy lay in being one of the London crowd and I actually enjoyed standing in a compartment packed with fifteen people on my way to Bromley North. How pleasant it was, in the war years, to stop dead outside Tower Bridge and to see a maroon go off in an air-raid warning and, even better, for a sentimentalist, to be stuck in one of those curry powder fogs that came up from the river and squashed London flat in its windless marsh. One listened to the fog signals and saw the fires of the watchmen; there was a sinister quiet as the train stood outside the Surrey Docks. And when, very late, the train got to Bromley North and one groped one’s way home, seeing the conductors with flares in their hands walking ahead of the buses, or cars lost and askew on the wrong side of the road, and heard footsteps but saw no person until he was upon you and asking where he was, one swanked to oneself that at last one had had a load of the traditional muck on one’s chest.

The thing I liked best was being sent on errands in Bermondsey. They became explorations, and I made every excuse to lengthen them. I pushed down south to the Dun Cow in the Old Kent Road, eastward by side streets and alleyways to Tower Bridge. I had a special pleasure in the rank places like those tunnels and vaults under the railway: the smells above all made me feel importantly a part of this working London. Names like Wilde’s Rents, Cherry Garden Street, Jamaica Road, Dockhead and Pickle Herring Street excited and my journeys were not simply street journeys to me: they were like crossing the desert, finding the source of the Niger. London was not a city; it was a foreign country as strange as India and even though I knew the Thames is a small river compared with the great ones of the world, I would patriotically make it wider and wider in my mind. I liked the Hide Market where groups of old women and children hung about the hide men who would occasionally flick off a bit of flesh from the hides: the children like little vultures snatched at these bits and put them in their mothers’ bags. We thought the children were going to eat these scraps, but in fact it is more likely—money being urgent to all Londoners—they were going to sell them to the glue merchants. The glue trade
haunted many busy Cockney minds. Owing to the loop of the river, Bermondsey has remained the most clannish and isolated part of London; people there were deeply native for generations. Their manner was unemotional but behind the dryness, there was the suggestion of the Cockney sob.

“What’ll y’ave? Lovin’ mem’ry or deepest sympathy?” the woman in the shop asked when I went to buy a mourning card for one of our office cleaners.

I would pass the Tanners Arms and wonder at the peculiar fact that the owner had a piece of tanned human skin “jes like pigskin.” The evenings came on and a procession of women and children would be wheeling their mattresses up to the railway tunnels or the deep tube station to be safe from the occasional raids. I would see other office boys wearing their bowler hats as I wore mine: we were a self-important, cracked-voice little race, sheepish, yet cocky, regarding our firms with childish awe.

But my work was dull. The terrible thing was that it was simple and mechanical; far, far less difficult than work at school. This was a humiliation and, even now, the simplicity of most of the work in offices, factories and warehouses depresses me. It is also all trite child’s play and repetition and the correcting of an infinitude of silly mistakes, compared with intellectual or professional labour. Most people seemed to me, then, and even now, chained to a dulling routine of systematized and tolerated carelessness and error. Whatever was going to happen to me, I knew I must escape from this easy, unthinking world and I understood my father’s dogged efforts to be on his own, and his own master. In difficulty lay the only escape, from what for me seemed to be deterioration of faculty.

The dullness, the long hours, the bad food, the low pay, the paring away of pleasure to a few hours late on Saturday afternoon, the tedious Sundays brightened only by that brief hour at the Sunday School—all these soon stunned and stunted me in my real life however much they moved me to live in my imagination. I accepted, with the native London masochism, that these were hard times and that this was to be my life. London has always preferred experience to satisfaction. I saw myself a junior clerk turning into a senior clerk comfortable
in my train, enjoying the characters of my fellow travellers, talking sententiously of the state of affairs in France, Hong Kong and Singapore and, with profound judiciousness, of the government. Over the years one would know these season ticket holders—perhaps not speaking to them—as well as the characters in a novel. Sometimes there was an oddity—the man who read Virgil as he travelled up and down. And there was always, for diversity, the girls who knitted for the soldiers and read novels. There was also the pride I felt in being enslaved in a city so world-famous, in being submerged in its brick, in being smoked and kippered by it. There was the curious satisfaction, in these months, of a settled fate and the feeling that here was good sense and, under the reserve, humour and decency.

But the office was brutalizing me. One morning I arrived and began teasing Daulton, the other office boy. He was slow and childish. I was trying to make him say: Parson’s Kway. He would take that from a clerk but not from an equal. He saw an enemy and flew at me. It was delightful: it was like being at school again. We were soon rolling on the floor and I was laughing, but he, I saw, was savage. Old Haylett wobbling up from the W.C. found us dishevelled in the dust. He put a stop to it and Daulton, trembling, began to cry. What had I done to him? He was afraid of getting the sack. Haylett took his side. So did the clerks. Daulton was their joke and treasure. I was spoiling it. When the cashier came he called me over and I said we were only “having a game.” “You have upset Daulton,” the cashier said gravely. “I am surprised at a boy like you wrestling with a boy of that type. You went to a better school than he did.” And I who had thought that Daulton and I were fellow victims! Daulton gave me a look of pompous disapproval and wistful reproach after this. The matter went on being debated by the cashier and the clerks, and I saw that I was in serious trouble. It was discussed with one of the partners. I became scared when he sent for me and came away incredulous. I was to be promoted. I was to go into the warehouse and learn the trade.

My life became freer and more interesting at once and I scarcely spoke to Daulton after that.

The firm was run by Mr Kenneth whose chauffeur brought him up from the country at ten. Mr Kenneth came in burdened like Abraham
and went, knees bent, in a fast aged shuffle, like a man stalking, to his office where he was soon ringing his bell. About the same time his four sons arrived, four quarrelling men between thirty-seven and fifty years old. The firm was a working model of that father-dominated life which has been typical of England since the Elizabethan age and perhaps always, for we must have got it from the Saxons and the Danes. In the Victorian age, with the great increase in wealth, the war between fathers and sons, between older brothers and younger, became violent, though rather fiercer in the middle-class than among manual workers where the mother held the wage packet. Until 1918 England was a club of energetic and determined parricides; in the last generation the club appears to have vanished altogether. So, in their various ways, Mr James, Mr Frederick, Mr William and Mr John, active and enterprising City men, were at war with each other and attacking Father when one or other of them was in favour. Mr John, the youngest and most genial, was the only one to regard the fray with grinning detachment. He sat on the opposite side of his father’s desk, unperturbed.

Mr James was the eldest, a precisionist and cultivated and intelligent man; he dealt in heavy leather. Mr Frederick, handsome, dashing and hot-tempered, whose eyes and teeth flashed operatically, was in foreign hides, a very speculative market; he lived in a fine house in Regent’s Park; Mr John drawled a shrewd and lazy life among fell-mongers and raw pelts; Mr William, to whom I fell, had an office on the warehouse floor and dealt in basils and skivers, i.e., tanned sheepskins. On this subject, under his teaching, I was to become an expert.

The British merchant has the reputation of being a deep and reserved, untalkative fellow, slow to act until he is certain, not easily deceived and a shade lazy. The four brothers entirely contradicted this legend, except in one respect: they were not easily deceived. Reserve they had none. They talked and shouted their heads off, they exposed their passions, they were headlong in action, as keen and excitable as flies and worked hard. Mr William was the most emotionally self-exposing of the brothers. He was a sportsman who had played hockey for England, a rather too ardent and too reminiscent golfer and extrovert. Owing to a damaged knee he was rejected for the Army during the war. His emotionalism annoyed his brothers. He would come into
the office crying out: “Father hates me. James has been telling Fred …” and so on, a wounded and sulky man. What their differences were I don’t know; but they were strong enough to break up the firm when the old man died.

I had often known the chapel-like groans of the main office to be interrupted by a pair of these storming brothers who pranced in a hot-tempered ballet. There had to be a peacemaker or catalyst and there was.

When I described the arrivals at our office there was one figure I did not mention: a dandy called Hobbs. For some reason he was not called
Mr
Hobbs and these were the days before people called anyone but a servant or a workman by Christian or nickname. The voice in which Hobbs was addressed was reverent; it might have been used to a duke who had, for some reason, condescended to slum with us all; it was a tone of intimacy, even of awe. He was on simple, equal terms with everyone from the old gentleman down to the boys. One finds his type more often in the north of England than in the south, and indeed he came from Leeds and had a faint, flat weary Yorkshire accent. His speech was plain but caressing. He had walked into the business, in his deceptively idle way, some years before and discreetly appointed himself to be the brains of the firm. To everybody and to me especially, he was the only person to whom I could talk. He was a man of about thirty.

One saw him, a tall thin figure, a sort of bent straw, but paddling down Weston Street early in the winter mornings, in his patent leather shoes, his fur-lined overcoat reaching to his ankles, his bowler hat tipped back from a lined forehead and resting, because of the long shape of his head, upon a pair of the ugliest ears I have ever seen. His little remaining hair rose in carefully barbered streaks over the long, egg-like head. A cigarette wagged in his mouth, his face was pale, seamed, ill and amused. Hobbs was a rake and his manner and appearance suggested days at the races and evenings at the stage door of the Gaiety, and the small hours at the card table. He looked as if he were dying—and he was—the skull grinned at one and the clothes fluttered about a walking skeleton.

BOOK: The Pritchett Century
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