The Pritchett Century (6 page)

Grandma always kept her white hair in curlers until a late hour in the afternoon, when she changed into one of her spotted blue dresses. The only day on which she looked less than neat was Monday. On this terrible day she pinned a man’s cloth cap to her hair, kirtled a rough skirt above her knees, put on a pair of wooden clogs and went out to the scullery to start the great weekly wash of sheets, pillow-cases, towels, table-cloths and clothes. They were first boiled in a copper, then she moved out to a wash-tub by the pump in the cobbled yard and she turned the linen round and round with the three-legged wooden “dolly”—as tall as myself—every so often remarking for her neighbours to hear that her linen was of better quality, better washed, whiter and cleaner than the linen of any other woman in the town; that the sight of her washing hanging on the line—where my grandfather had to peg and prop it—would shame the rest of the world and the final ironing be a blow to all rivals. The house smelled of suds and ironing. Her clogs clattered in the yard. But, sharp at five o’clock she changed as usual and sat down to read the
British Weekly
.

On Tuesday, she made her first baking of the week. This consisted of different kinds of bread and I watched it rise in its pans to its full beauty before the fire; on Thursday, she made her second baking, concentrating less on bread than on pies, her Madeira cake, her seed-cake, her Eccles cakes, her puffs, her lemon-curd or jam tarts and tarts of egg “custard,” operations that lasted from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon once more. The “bake” included, of course, the scouring of pans and saucepans which a rough village girl would help her with. At the end, the little creature showed no sign of being tired, but would “lay” there was no better cook in the town than herself and pitied the cooking of her sisters.

On Wednesdays she turned out the house. This cleaning was ferocious.
The carpets were all taken up and hung on a line, my grandfather got out a heavy stick to beat them while she stood beside him saying things like “Eeh Willyum, I can’t abide dirt.” There was some nasty talk among the Congregationalists in Sedbergh about my grandfather’s carpet-beating; they got their own back for the boasting of my grandma and some said out loud that he was obviously not the class of man to be teaching the word of God in that town. (Forty years later when I went back to the town after his death, one or two old people still spoke in a shocked way of their working-class minister who was under the thumb of his “stuck-up” wife. That came of a man’s marrying above himself.)

After the carpets, the linoleum was taken up and Grandma was down on her knees scrubbing the floor boards. Then came hours of dusting and polishing.

“Woman,” Granda often said on Wednesdays, standing very still and thundery and glaring at her, “lay not up your treasure on earth where moth and dust doth corrupt.”

“Eeh Willyum,” she would reply, “wipe your boots outside. Ah can’t abide a dirty doormat. Mrs So-and-so hasn’t whitened her step since Monday.”

And once more she would settle down as pretty as a picture to an evening, making another rag rug or perhaps crocheting more and more lace for her dresses, her table-centres and her doilies. By the time she was eighty years old she had stored away several thousand of these doilies, chests full of them; and of course they were superior to the work of any other woman in the country. In old age, she sent boxes of them to her younger son who had emigrated to Canada, thinking he might be “in want.”

I remember a tea for Sunday-school teachers at the Manse. They came, excited young men and bouncing young women who went out in the fields and trees along the beck to see who could collect and name the largest number of different species of wild flower in an hour. An older woman won with fifty-seven different kinds. We got back to my grandmother’s parlour where the sun shone through the little square lights of her windows, to see one of my grandmother’s masterpieces, a state tea laid on the table. The scones, the tea-cakes, Eccles
cakes, jam tarts, iced tarts, her three or four different kinds of cake, sultana, Madeira, seed and jammed sponge, her puffs and her turn-overs were set out in all their yellows, browns, pinks and, as usual, in her triumph, my grandmother was making a pettish little mouth, “laying” that “nowt like it” would be seen on any table in the town. The company stood reverently by their chairs and then, to my disgust, they broke out into a sung grace, conducted by the eldest of the teachers, each taking parts, bass and tenor, soprano and contralto, repeating their variations for what seemed to me a good twenty minutes before setting to. To my wonder—for I had been nicely brought up by my grandmother—the eldest teacher who was a very old man with the big hands of a labourer, tipped his tea into his saucer, blew on it and drank.

“Look at the man,” I shouted. “He’s being rude.”

There was a silence. The old man was angry. Grandma was vexed. There was a dispute about whether I should be told to leave the room. One of the girls saved me. But the old man kept coming back to it and it was the whole subject of the tea-party, and for days the minister and his wife had the matter over with me. If that was “London manners,” the old man growled when he left, he didn’t want owt of them. Such slights are never forgotten in the north; they go all round the town and add to its obdurate wars. The story was reported to my father in London and was brought up indignantly year after year. To think that a boy, a relation of the minister’s, too, and already known to have exposed himself in school, should say a thing like that. One experience I feared to tell them. That day of the flower hunt, I had found a beautiful white flower like a star growing near the river. I had never seen a white flower so silky and star-like, in its petals, and so exquisite. I picked it, smelled it and dropped it at once. It stank. The smell was not only rank, it suggested rottenness and a deep evil. It was sin itself. And I hurried away, frightened, from the river, not daring to mention it and I never walked through that field again. For many years I thought of this deceit. I did not know this flower was the wild garlic, the most evocative of our aphrodisiacs, the male to the female musk.

The general portrait of the country people of Haworth which is given by Mrs Gaskell in her life of Charlotte Brontë, very closely fitted the character of my Yorkshire relations if one allows for the taming
effects of lower middle-class gentility. Haworth-like tales were common among the Sawdons. They were proud, violent, egotistical. They had—according to your view—either a strong belief in the plain virtues or a rock-like moral conceit. Everything was black or white to them. They were blunt to your face, practical and unimaginative, kind yet iron-minded, homely and very hospitable; but they suspected good manners, they flayed you with their hard and ironical eyes. They were also frugal, close and calculating about money—they were always talking about “brass”—and they looked on outsiders with scorn. They were monosyllabic talkers but their silences concealed strong passions that (as Mrs Gaskell said) lasted for life, whether that passion was of love or hatred. Their friendship or their enmity was for ever. To listen to their talk was like listening to a fire crackling. They had no heroes. They were cautious and their irony was laconic. I was in the city of York soon after it was bombed in the last war and I said to a railway worker,

“Well they didn’t destroy the Minster.”

“Ay, they say as how Hitler says he’s going to be married there next May. But ah doan’t know …”

With that last phrase dryly uttered he gave me a look as hard as steel.

Year after year I went to Sedbergh to sit on the stool by my grandmother’s fire, staring at the pots that hung simmering on their shining chains over the coals, smelling the green country bacon and the rising bread. One day a boy from the famous Public School at Sedbergh was called in to tell me how many years it would be before I reached the verb “sum” in Latin and could enter the school and go for their terrible fifteen mile “runs” across the fells, the toughest schoolboy run in England. I often saw the boys slogging along near the ravine. This was one of the many schools I never went to.

My grandfather’s home life was laborious and thrifty. Coals were bargained for in the summer and sacked down, carefully counted piece by piece, in a heap near the stone shed. He would then grade the pieces in sizes and (reverting to his brick-laying days), he would build them into a wall inside the shed. Each day he would collect, one by one, the various sizes of coal needed for an economical fire. They were
small, slow burning fires, often damped down in order to save, but in the winters of valley fog or snow, we were thickly clad in Yorkshire wool and I remembered no cold. After his work in the house he had work to do in his garden also. He had to dig all of it. There were his vegetables and his raspberries which, in the ripe season, he sold at twopence a cup to the town. Notices saying, Thou Shalt Not Steal were placed on sticks on the wall by the school lane. He had little time or peace for his ministry; or opportunity for his secret vice: cigar smoking. The Congregationalists would not have tolerated tobacco smoking in their minister, any more than they would have stood for drinking, but I’ve known him drink a glass of strong home-brewed ale at an isolated farm and, as for the cigar, his habit was to sneak off to the petty or earth closet at the end of the garden, latch himself in with Bible and writing-paper, light up, take his ease and write his sermon. My grandmother was always frantic when he was out of her sight for a minute—she did her best to stop him going on his parish visits, for she would “lay” the men would be out at work and he would have to see the women, which raised her instant jealousy—and on his cigar days her delicate nose would sometimes catch the smell coming out of the top of the petty door. She would run down the garden and beat on the door with a yard-broom, shouting.

“Willyum, Willyum, come out of that, you dirty man.”

Sunday was his day. On this day my grandmother respected him and herself withdrew into a silent self-complacency as her Willyum prepared for the Christian rites. He had an early and a late service in the mornings, another in the afternoon and one in the evening. He prepared for the day in soldierly way, as for battle. He shaved so closely that there was generally a spot of blood on his chin and his cheeks were pale. His surplice was a disappointing, cotton affair, like a barber’s sheet—poor quality I came to think, shop-shoddy—as he set off across the gravel path to the chapel which made one side of his garden cold and damp. I was put into my Sunday best—sailor collar, vest that choked me, linen breeches that sawed at the crotch and cut me above the knees when I sat, legs dangling, swelling and aching in the pew; and my grandmother had on her best bonnet and costume. We smelled of new cloth, but she relieved this by soaking her handkerchief
in Lily of the Valley and gave me a sniff of it. She also took smelling salts. Then comes the agony of sitting in those oaken pews and keeping my eyes fixed on Grandfather. What he says I never understand but he goes on and on for a long time. So do the hymns. There is the cheerful break when the plate goes round, the happiness of putting in a penny; and then there is the moment which makes me giggle—and at times (when my brother was with me), the joke was too much. My grandfather would give out notices and announce the sum of last Sunday’s collection, a sum like eight shillings and three pence halfpenny. (His living, by the way.) His voice is harsh, but what convulses me is his way of pronouncing the word halfpenny; he calls it, in curt northern fashion ha’penny with the broad “a”—“hah-pny.” I often tell my father of this later in London who points out I have no call to complain when, in pure Cockney I talk of a boy who lives “dahn ahr wy.”

Back we go to cold beef for it is wicked to cook anything on Sundays—except Yorkshire pudding. This is sacred. Light as an omelette yet crisp in the outer foliations of what it would be indelicate to call crust, it has no resemblance to any of that heavy soggy fatty stuff known all over England and America by the name. Into it is poured a little gravy made of meat and not from some packaged concoction. One might be eating butterflies, so lightly does it float down; it is my grandmother’s form of poetry. Grandfather asks if I would like “a small bortion more” for Non-conformists often affected small changes of consonant, “p” becoming “b” and an “s” becoming a “z,” and then asks his wife what she thought of the sermon. The faithful always called themselves “uz,” the “z” separating them from sinners. Her reply is to ask if he noticed Mrs Somebody’s terrible new hat and to add that she didn’t think owt to the material of the new coat Mrs Somebody Else had dressed herself up in.

The afternoon is more serious. I had no toys or games at my grandfather’s—nor did my father when he was a boy—and I did not miss them. There was enough in garden, country or the simple sight of things to keep me occupied and, for years, in my parents’ house the smell of toys seemed unpleasant and their disasters too distressing. One always thought of the money they cost. On Sundays at Sedbergh
I was allowed into my grandfather’s study. It was a small room with a few hundred books in it, almost all sermons, and he would read to me some pious tale about, perhaps, a homeless orphan, driven to sleep on straw, in some shed in Manchester, surrounded by evil-doers. The boy resists starvation, and after a long illness, is rescued by benevolent middle-class people.

When I tried to read these tales I found the words were too long and so I gazed at the green Berg, watched the cloud shadows make grey or blue faces on the grass, and the sheep nibbling there. The quiet and loneliness were exquisite to me; and it was pleasant to smell the print of my grandfather’s paper and hear him turn over the pages in such a silence. When I grew up the Christian God ceased to mean anything to me; I was sick of Him by the twenties; but if I think of a possible God some image of the Berg comes at once to my mind now, or of certain stones I remember in the ravine. To such things the heathen in his wisdom always bowed.

I did not understand my grandfather’s sermons. My mother who had sat through many told me his manner was hard and monotonous and that he was one to whom hatred and the love of truth were very much the same thing, his belief being that truth is afflicting and unpleasant. He argued people into hell, not in the florid manner of the melodramatic hell-fire preachers who set the flames dancing so that in the end they became like theatre flames to the self-indulgent. My grandfather’s method was to send people to hell rationally, contemptuously and intellectually. He made hell curtly unattractive; he even made it boring. This was an error; later on, his congregations dwindled, for he offered no beanos of remorse, salvation or luxuriant ruin. He could not see that sin is attractive and that therefore its condemnation must be more voluptuous.