The Pritchett Century (11 page)

Eyes bloodshot, breath still smoking gin or whisky of the night before,
he arrived almost as early as the office boys in order to get at the office mail before anyone else saw it. He memorized it; he was now equipped to deal with all the intrigue, quarrels and projects. By some nervous intimation he knew whenever a girl came into the office and he smiled at them all and his large serious eyes put them into a state. To all, at some time or other, he said “Darling, I’d like to bite your pretty shoulders.” Except to the dragon, the old man’s secretary, who often handed out religious tracts. She saw in Hobbs, no doubt, an opportunity for rescue and he deferred to her and started reading a line or two of the tracts at once while she was there and making expert comments on a passage in Exodus or Kings, so that the old lady began to blush victoriously. Girls liked to be caught in the warehouse lift with him for he instantly kissed their necks and looked their clothes over. His good manners overwhelmed Mrs Dunkley-Dunkerley in her kitchen. All office work stopped, even the cashier stopped his call-over of the accounts, when Hobbs went to the telephone and smiling at it, as if it were a very old raffish crony, ordered a chauffeur-driven Rolls to collect him in the evening and pick up one of his girls to take them to dinner at the Ritz. The partners listened to him in fright, wondering aloud about his debts, but would soon be confiding in him, as everyone else did and be angling for his advice.

“Look what Father has done. James has told Father that Fred …”—Hobbs who always wore his bowler hat in the office and was the only one who was allowed to smoke, nodded and listened with religious attentiveness. The appearance of physical weakness and dissipation was a delusion. The firm chin, strong coarse mouth, the rapidity of mind, were signs of great nervous strength. The partners were gentlemen of the cheerfully snobbish kind. Hobbs was an intellectual from a provincial university who had read a lot and was a dilettante. His brain was in a continuous and efficient fever. If trade was slack and he had no business or customers to deal with, he’d go round the office and, with a smile that they could not resist, would take the clerks’ pens from them with a “By your leave, laddie” and do all their accounts and calculations in a few minutes while they gaped at him. Their lives were ruled by having to work out exasperating sums as, for example, 3 cwt. 2 quarters 9 lbs. at 3s. 4½d. per lb. less commission and discount of 3½
per cent. He could do scores of sums like these in a few minutes. Or, for amusement, he would tot up the head cashier’s ledgers so fast that this sorrowing and very pious man would look over his glasses with admiration and momentarily forgive Hobbs his obvious debauches. With the workmen he was the same; he got them out of the labourious messes they made of their weighing slips, gave them racing tips, was knowing about prize fights and once in a while would buy them a drink in the pub next door where he was well known. Where was he not well known!

“Out of the great kindness of your heart, duckie,” I’ve heard him say to the barmaid of a discreet hide-out near London Bridge, “would you give me a rather large gin and French?”

I had to work with Hobbs and soon, infatuated, I dressed exactly as he in white coat and bowler hat, pushing it back over my ears in helpless admiration of him. I had to sit with him and keep the Epitome Book, a summary of the hundreds of letters that came in. I have always been prone to intellectual disaster. For years I thought this book was called the Opitomy Book, for I used to think of Epitome as a three syllable word.

I was enraptured by Hobbs. For a boy of sixteen is there anything like his first sight of a man of the world? I was enraptured by London Bridge, Bermondsey and the leather trade. I liked its pungent smell. I liked watching the sickly green pelts come slopping out of the pits at the leather dresser’s down the street, I liked paddling among the rank and bloody hides of the market; I would cadge the job of cutting the maggots of the warble fly out of a hide in our hide shed. I liked the dirty jobs. I wanted to know everything I could about leather. Gradually, literature went out of the window: to be a leather factor, or, better still, a country tanner was my dream. I spent my days on the seven floors of the warehouse, turning over dozens of calf skins with the men, measuring sheepskins and skivers and choking myself with the (to me) aromatic shumac dust. At home the family edged away from me: I stank of the trade. With my father and me it was a war between Araby and the tanpit.

The leather trade is an interesting trade, for skins and hides are as variable as nature. At certain seasons, in the breeding season, for example,
the skin will be hard and “cockled”; heavily woolled sheep like the merinos drag the surface of the leather into ridges so that the body of some old man seemed to lie under my measuring ruler. Some skins are unaccountably greasy and have to be degreased; others may have heated in the hold of a ship; yet others may have been over-salted by a tanner who perhaps hopes when the temperature rises, that they will pick up moisture and weight. After a time one could tell from which town and county of England any skin came and from which tannery, for each tanner had his own methods, his peculiar waters and style. The names were cheerful: skivers and basils, shoulders, bellies, split-hide bellies and butts—the animals seemed to lie ba-aaing and lowing, as one looked at the grain of the skins for their quality or their defects; to see which could be dyed in red or green, say, or which—owing to the flaws in the grain, would have to be dyed in the cheaper black. There was change in every bale that the crane lifted off the vans and heaved into the “gaps” where the men chalked the tally on the walls. And change in the human scene too. On market days, many of the tanners came to the office. They came mainly from the small towns of England and the variety of character fascinated me. A brash bearded fellow in a cowboy hat who came roaring in and shouting that we were “a lot of stuckup London snobs” and his money was as good as ours; the trembling pair of elderly black-bearded brothers from Dorset who stood together, shoulders touching, like Siamese twins and had the suspicious and dour look of conspiring lay preachers; the flash Welshman; the famous sole leather man from Cumberland; the sad country gentleman tanner from Suffolk; the devastating fashionable tycoon who was making a fortune, wore a monocle, was something to do with Covent Garden Opera and introduced me to the name of Flaubert.

In due time I was sent down to the wharves of Pickle Herring Street or the docks, to make reports on damaged skins that had been dropped into the river, or on thousands of bales which had come in from Australia. A literary job: as the bales were opened for me in these warehouses that smelled of camphor or the mutton-fat smell of wool or rancid furs, I wrote in my large book, an estimate and a description. It was curious to open a bale from the ship or barge alongside and to see, as one got to the centre of it, that it was blackening with heat and at
the centre, charred and cindery. When I grew up and read Defoe’s
Complete English Tradesman
I knew the pleasure he felt in the knowledge of a trade, its persons and its ways. If I knew nothing else, at the end of four years I was proud of my knowledge of leather. It was a gratifying knowledge. During the last war I had to spend some time in shipyards on the Tyne and the Clyde and the passionate interest in a craft came back to me; and although I was then an established writer, I half wished I had spent my life in an industry. The sight of skill and of traditional expertness is irresistible to me.

My absorption in the leather trade went to comical lengths. Father had bought a fat encyclopaedia, second hand, and dated 1853; I discovered in it a full technical account of the tanning process. I decided to tan a skin myself. I got a small tank, brought home some shumac and then considered the process. First I had to get an animal and then skin it; then, either by pasting it on the flesh side with a depilatory, or letting it heat to the point of decay that is not injurious to the skin, I would have to scrape off the hair. There were superficial skins to remove. I would then have to place it in the proper liquids, having first transferred it for a time to a tank of fermented dog dung in order to soften it. And so on. The difficulty was to find an animal small enough. Our dog? Our cat? One of our rabbits? The thought sickened me. A mouse? There were plenty in the house. I set a trap and caught one. But it was pretty and the prospect of letting its skin sweat and removing the fur with my fingers repelled me. I gave up the idea.

In my second year in the trade, in the summer holiday, I hired a bicycle and went up to Ipswich, stopping at a country tannery on the way. It belonged to the sad gentleman farmer. He gave me lunch and I showed off to his pretty daughter. After lunch he took me round the tannery. This was the life, I thought, as I walked round the pits: to be a country gentleman, marry this nice girl and become a tanner. There might be some interesting erotic social difficulties of the kind that occurred in
John Halifax, Gentleman
by Mrs Craik, a novel that fed my daydreams at this time. The pits were laid out like a chequer board and we walked between them. I was in the midst of this daydream when I slipped and I fell up to the neck into the cold filthy ooze of the pit. A workman hooked me out on his pit pole before I went under, for these
pits are deep; I was rushed to a shed, stripped and hosed down. Stinking, I was taken back to the house, and dressed up in an assortment of clothes, including a shooting jacket much too large and a pair of football shorts belonging to the tanner’s ten-year-old son. The nice girl had left to laugh in her room.

This was my baptism into the trade; now I think of it, the only baptism I have ever had.

I was happier in my hours in the leather trade than I was at home; and strangely, I believe, the encouragement to think again of being a writer came from people in the trade. One or two of the customers saw the books I was reading on my desk and I discovered that many of these businessmen knew far more about literature than I did. There was the tycoon with his Flaubert—whom I did not read for years—there was Beale, the leather dresser, who recited Shakespeare at length, as we went through the skivers on the top floor; there was Egan, our foreman, a middle-aged and gentle man with a soft voice who, in between calling orders to the men and going over his weighing slips, would chat to me about Dickens and Thackeray. Once a month he would get blind drunk for a few days and then return, otherworldly and innocent, to have a bookish talk. There was a leather belting manufacturer who introduced me to literary criticism. They were amused by my naivety; but when they got down to their business affairs with Mr William and the watching of the market, I realized that although I knew a lot about leather, I knew nothing about trade and money, and that the ability or taste for making it was missing in me. Beale, the Shakespearean, showed that to me. He was a man of fifty who had inherited his business and was always in straits and was rather contemptuously treated in the trade because of his incompetence. He took me round his works and looked miserably at the rollers that came down from their arms, striking the skins, with a racket that he could not stand. “Keep out of it,” he said. “Unless you know how to make money, it is no good.”

Hobbs sat or dangled from his high stool and said “Journalism’s the life, laddie. You read too many classics. You ought to read modern stuff. Journalists are the bright lads. What about W. J. Locke?”

I saw it at once when I read
The Beloved Vagabond, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
and
Septimus
, that Hobbs had modelled himself on Locke’s gentlemanly, Frenchified Bohemianism. A bottle of wine, a French
mistress was his ideal—often realized; at any rate he had soon established one of the new women who came to the firm, the widow of a French soldier, in his flat. There was Thomas Hardy, too, he said, and Arnold Bennett. So I threw up the classics and took to the open (French) road with Locke as a successor to Stevenson; and a precursor to Belloc. I had discovered the writers I really admired: the travellers. I bought most of the books I read, and had done so at school too, by spending my food money on them. I gave up the Dining Rooms and the Express Dairy; instead in the lunch-hour I bought a bar of chocolate or a packet of biscuits and a book for a few pence at a shop near the arches at the station, walked across London Bridge and went on lunch-hour tours of the Wren churches—to the organ recitals at St Stephen’s in Walbrook and St Dunstan’s in the East and to St Magnus the Martyr in Billingsgate. I knew I should admire the Wren churches but they bored me. The classical Italian beauty of St Stephen’s in Walbrook seemed cold to the clerkly follower of Ruskin; cold and also—to a dissenter—moneyed and even immoral. The elegant St Mary Woolnoth and even St Magnus the Martyr and its carvings, seemed to me as “worldly” as the boardrooms of banks. And in Southwark Cathedral I had an experience of the “mechanical” worship of the Church of England. A young clergyman sitting at a harmonium in one of the aisles was teaching another the correct intonation of

“The Lord be with you”

and the response

“And with Thy spirit”

which they repeated dozens of times, trying to get it right. Now I could admire; then I scowled like a Bunyan at “vain repetitions.”

The one real church, for me, was St Bartholomew’s. I visited these churches as a stern cultural duty, but also out of a growing piety towards the London past. The pleasure was in the organ recitals held in the lunch-hour. Lately introduced by our neighbour to Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, I now was entranced by Bach’s fugues. This taste was literary and due to Browning; all my tastes were conventionally Victorian. The monocled tycoon who had revolutionized the tanning of sheep-skins, heard with horror of my unfashionable ideas. I seemed irredeemably backward and lower class and the cry of the autodidact and snob broke out in me in agony “Shall I never catch up?”

I soon knew the alley ways of the city and intrigued to be sent to Ministries in Westminster. I ventured into Fleet Street and stared longingly at newspaper offices. Often I longed to be in love; but I was already in love with London, and although too shy to go into pubs—and hating anyway the taste of beer—I would listen to the rattle of dominoes among the coffee tables of the Mecca as far north as Moor-gate, and obscurely feel my passion. I even walked from Bermondsey to Westminster. To love, travel is almost the complete alternative; it is lonely, it is exhausting, but one has lived completely by one’s eyes and ears and is immolated in the world one is discovering. When, at last, I did find a girl, all we did was dumbly walk and walk round London Streets till I dropped her at her office door. When I read books of the glamour-of-London kind, I was disappointed with myself and tried to whip myself up into a glamorized state, for I could not see or know what the writer knew; but a London of my own was seeping into me without my knowing it and, of course, was despised because it was “every day experience.”