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Authors: V.S. Pritchett

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This poem was often bandied about and pointed at when Granda Pritchett came down to London and denounced my father’s latest religion, for Father was continually going one better in the matter of faith. The other picture showed simply an envelope on which was written:

Messrs Sell and Repent,
          Prosperous Place,
                          The Earth.

This was the spirit of the early 1900’s. Things, as Father said, were beginning to hum.

My parents rarely stayed in one house for as long as a year. After Woodford there is a dash to Derby where Father hoped to do well with a Canadian Insurance Company, and where, in north-country fashion, we had a pump beside the sink; in a month or so we are back. We had various London addresses: Woodford again, Palmers Green, Balham, Uxbridge, Acton, Ealing, Hammersmith, Camberwell are some of them; then back to Ipswich again, on to Dulwich and Bromley. By the time I was twelve, Mother was saying we had moved fourteen times and Father went fat in the face with offence and said she exaggerated. At this, she counted up on her fingers and said she now made it eighteen.

We moved mainly to small red-brick villas, the rents running from 9s. and even to 12s. a week, once or twice to poor flats. It seemed to us that Father had genius. By the time there were four children—three boys and a girl—Father seemed as sumptuous as a millionaire and my mother was worn down. It was like a marriage of the rich and the poor. She cooked, cleaned, made our clothes and her own, rarely had the money to pay for a girl to help her and went about a lot of the day with a coarse apron on, her blouse undone and her hair down her back. Patently genius was lacking in her. For it was he who came home in the evenings or at week-ends from places like Glasgow, Bournemouth or Torquay, having stayed in hotels with names like Queens, Royal or Majestic, palaces of luxury. We learned to wait at the door and to open it for him when he came home, because he was affronted if he had to let himself in with his own key. We would often wait for an hour. When he got in he walked into the front room where we ate, sat down in an armchair and, without a word, put out his foot. Mother’s duty was to kneel and unbutton his boots until laced boots came in, when she unlaced them; eventually we squabbled for this honour. “Ease the sock” Father would say with regal self-pity. And he would tell her about the orders he had taken that week. His little order books were full of neat figures and smelled warmly of scent.

And then—the magic of the man!—without warning we would, as I say, get up one morning to find my mother in her fawn rain-coat (her only coat), and hat, ourselves being pulled into coats too. A cabby and his horse would be coughing together outside the house and the next thing we knew we were driving to an underground station and to a
new house in a new part of London, to the smell of new paint, new mice dirts, new cupboards, and to race out into a new garden to see if there were any trees and start, in our fashion to wreck the garden and make it the byword of the neighbourhood. The aggravating thing was that my mother was always crying in the cabs we took; and then my father would begin to sing in his moving bass voice:

Oh dry those tears
Oh calm those fears
Life will be brighter tomorrow
.

Or, if he was exasperated with her, it would be

Tell me the old, old story
For I forget so soon
.

I look back on these early years and chiefly remember how crowded and dark these houses were and that, after Uxbridge, there is always a nasty smell, generally of sour breadcrumbs at the edges of the seats of chairs, the disgusting smell of young children, after my sister and youngest brother were born. And there was the continual talk of rudeness. It was rooted in our very name for we soon learned that Pritchett was the same as Breeches for other children; one polite little boy called my mother Mrs Trousers because he had gathered that “breeches” was rude. Mother—and especially her mother, Gran—were the sources of a mysterious prurience. Gran liked chamber-pot humour and was almost reverent about po’s, mentioning that Aunt Short said that the best thing for the complexion was to wash one’s face in “it”—and good for rheumatism too. The bottom was the most rude thing we had, and, in consequence, the Double U. Rudeness became almost mystical if we caught Gran on the Double U when she left the door unlocked. Girls were rude because of their drawers; women, because of their long skirts, and more rude than men because they had so much more to cover. To crawl under a table and lift the hem of a skirt was convulsingly rude. At certain times Mother and Father were rude—not when she was in bed and her astonishing titty-bottles
slipped out of her nightdress, like a pair of follies; but when she and Father went for a walk together and we walked behind them. We felt that it was rude to see a marriage walking about in front of the neighbours. Granda and Grandma Pritchett were never rude; but Mother was rude in herself—she wore “bloomers” and often “showed” them—but Father, on his own, never. I was ashamed for years of a photograph of us children. The corner of my sister’s silk dress had lodged on my knee as I sat next to her.
I
was rude.

One thing became noticeable in our removals. Very often my father and mother went to different destinations—she to the new house while my father and I would find ourselves at Euston station in the middle of the night. I was off by the midnight train to my grandfather’s in Repton and later to Sedbergh, to be away in the north for weeks or even months. My brother, it seemed, was off to Ipswich to stay with my mother’s sister, Ada. My sister and baby brother were at home. At one time I found myself sitting on the carrier of my father’s bicycle travelling from Nottingham to Derby. Another time I remember travelling in a hansom to Paddington and yet again standing one winter’s morning beside the driver of a horse tram down Tooley Street on a roundabout journey via Tower Bridge to King’s Cross. So began my love of change, journeys and new places. As many London children do, I skilfully lost myself in the streets and was twice picked up by the police. Most of these journeys which my father thoughtfully provided were, as I say, to the north. Repton I scarcely remember; but to Sedbergh, Kirbymoorside and Appleton-le-Moors I went again and again. We would get out of the night train, my father and I, at a junction near Kendal, at the gateway through the mountains to the Scottish border, cross the lines and take the little train to Sedbergh, that neat town of grey stone lying under the bald mountain I thought was called the Berg. The horse brake would take us up the main street, following a herd of cows. By the Manse and chapel, Granda was waiting. In the distance, on her whitened doorstep and close to a monkey-puzzle tree, stood Grandma in her starched white apron, her little pale iced-cake face and her glasses glittering. I remember an arrival when I was six. My grandmother would not let me into her clean house until she looked me over.

“Eeh Walter, for shame, t’lad’s buttons are off his jersey, his breeches have a hole in them. I’m raight vexed with your Beatie, letting a son of hers come up with his stockings in holes and his shoes worn through. Eeh, he looks nowt but a poor little gutter boy. For shame, Walter. For shame, Victor. I lay you’ve been playing in the London muck. I dassn’t show you to the neighbours. Nay, look at his breeches, Willyum.”

“Mother made them.” I stuck up for Mother, not for her sake but because of the astonishing material she used—mostly curtains from our house. Nothing covering a window, a table or a sofa was safe from my mother’s scissors when the sewing fit was on her. “I’ll get those old curtains down.” She was an impatient woman.

My grandmother took me inside, undressed me in the hall and held the breeches up and looked at them.

“Eeh Willyum, come here. They’re not stitched. They’re just tacked. T’lad’ll be naked in ’t street.”

It was true. Mother’s slapdash tacking often let us down.

On these visits, the minister would be having a sarcastic argument with his son about the particular God of the moment, for Father had left the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Wesleyans, the Methodists in turn, being less and less of a Jehovah man and pushing his way—it turned out—towards the Infinite. He was emerging from that pessimism which ate at his Victorian elders. The afternoon bus came and he went. Up the back step of the station brake he skipped, to pick up a couple of hampers of traveller’s samples in Manchester. I was glad to be rid of the family and scarcely thought of my mother or my brother and sister for weeks. Here was what I was made for: new clothes, new shirts, new places, the new life, jam tarts, Eccles cakes, seed-cakes, apple puffs and Yorkshire pudding. My grandparents looked at each other and then at me with concern for my character. I did not know that almost every time we moved house Father had lost his job or was swinging dangerously between an old disaster and a new enterprise, that he was being pursued by people to whom he owed money, that furniture had “gone back” or new unpaid-for furniture had “come in.” I did not know that my mother wept because of this, even as she slyly concealed, clenched in her fingers a half sovereign
that some kind neighbour had given her. And I remember now how many times, when my father left in the morning for his work, she barred his way at the door or screamed at him from the gate, “Walt, Walt, where’s my money?” But I did see that here in Sedbergh there was domestic peace.

It is a small old town smelling of sheep and cows, with a pretty trout beck running through it under wooded banks. The fells, cropped close by sheep, smelling of thyme and on sunny days played on by the shadows of the clouds, rise steeply behind the town and from the top of them one sees the austere system of these lonely mountains running westward to the Pikes of the Lake District and north to the border. One is almost in Westmorland and, not far off, one sees the sheepwalks of Scott’s
The Two Drovers
, the shepherd’s road to Scotland. The climate is wet and cold in winter; the town is not much sheltered and day after day there will be a light, fine drizzle blowing over from Westmorland and the Irish Sea. When it begins people say “Ay, it’s dampening on.” These people are dour but kindly.

Yorkshire is the most loved of all the many places of my childhood. I was sent to my first school, the village school at the top of the town, up the lane from the Manse garden—it is just as it was when I was a child sixty years ago. The school sat in two classes and, I suppose, each class had about forty or fifty boys and girls, the girls in pinafores and long black or tan stockings. Douthwaite, Louthwaite, Thistlethwaite, Braithwaite, Branthwaite were the common surnames. The children spoke a dialect that was hard to understand. They came from farms and cottages, both sexes brisk and strenuous. We sat in three tiers in the class-room, the upper one for bigger children. While I was doing pothooks and capital D’s from a script, the others were taught sums. Being a London child with a strange accent I began to swank, particularly to the girls. One who sat with me in the front offered to show me her belly if I lowered my own breeches. I did so, being anxious to show her my speciality—a blind navel, for the cord had been so cut that my navel was closed. In her opinion—and that of others—this was “wrong” and foretold an early death because no air could get inside me. This distinction made me swank more. She did not keep her part of the bargain, neither did any of the other girls in Sedbergh. She put
up her hand and told teacher. This was the first of many painful lessons, for I instantly loved girls.

This incident was reported to the Manse. Also a scuffle or two in the school yard, being caught peeing over a wall to see how far we could go, with a lot of village lads, and a small burglary I got into with a village boy who persuaded me to slip into an old woman’s cottage and steal some Halma pieces from her desk. We lied about this. My grandfather, waiting to catch me naked in the bath tub, gave me a spanking that stung for hours. I screamed at him and said that I hoped he would be run over by the London express at the level-crossing the next time he crossed the line at the Junction. More spanking. I was removed from the school because the neighbours were talking. I was surprised for I was a pious little boy, packed with the Ten Commandments and spotless on Sundays: the farmers’ boys, the blacksmiths’ sons and all the old wheelwrights, tree fellers, shepherds thought I was a townee and a softie. I would never be able to herd sheep, shoe or ride a horse, use a pickaxe or even work in a woollen mill. My secret was that I was going to be a preacher like my grandfather; he had begun teaching me Latin, pointing out the Latin words on a penny—
fidei defensor
. I was to be defender (with spears and guns if necessary) of the faith, “prepared to receive cavalry.” For years I thought this and Calvary were the same thing.

The Manse at Sedbergh smelled of fruit and was as silent as church and had even churchy furniture in yellow oak, most of it made by country craftsmen, who in a fit of fancy, might carve, say, acorns or leaves all round the edge of a table. There was no sound but the tick tock of the grandfather clock. Everything was polished, still and clean. One slept in a soft feather bed and woke to see the mist low down on the waist of the Berg. On the old brick wall of the garden my grandfather grew his plums and pears, and in the flower-beds his carnations, his stock, his roses and his sweet-williams; and under the wall flowed a little stream from the mountains.

It was a kind, grave house. My grandparents were in their early fifties. For my grandmother cleanliness was the first passion. Whenever I stayed in my first years with her she bathed me in a zinc tub before the kitchen fire and was always scrubbing me. Once she tried to remove a mole from my nose, thinking it was a speck of tar. For two days,
on and off, she worked at it with soap, soda, pumice and grit and hard brushes, exclaiming all the time like Lady Macbeth; while my grandfather growled “Let it bide, you’re spreading his nose all over his face.” He had a genial sadistic touch, for he loved to point to a scar on the tip of my nose which seemed to shine like a lamp and make me ridiculous; and also to say that my nose was the nearest thing to an elephant’s foot he had ever seen. He enjoyed making me angry. It was Yorkshire training.

BOOK: The Pritchett Century
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