The Pritchett Century (7 page)

Frankly the congregations expected an artist and they discovered instead a critic. They were puzzled. That enormous success in the Free Trade Hall at Manchester was not repeated. Grandfather was essentially an intellectual and some said—my parents among them—that his marriage to a vain, houseproud and jealous girl who never read anything in her life except the love serial in the
British Weekly
and who upset the ladies of his many chapels by her envies and boastings, was
a disaster for an intellectual man. The Congregationalists invite their ministers and the news of her character got round. But how can one judge the marriages of others? There are families that are claustrophobic, that live intensely for themselves and are indifferent to the existence of other people and are even painfully astonished by it. His truculence in the Army was a symptom of solitary independence.

The pious story of the Manchester orphan had one importance: for the first time I heard of the industrial revolution. This was real to the north-country people. We knew nothing about it in the commercial south. There were little mills in the valleys where my grandfather took me to see the mill girls at their machines. There were the tall chimneys of Leeds and York. One spoke of people, not by who they were, but by what they did. Their work defined them. Men who met at street corners in Sedbergh knew of strikes and labour wars; and my grandfather told me of masters and men with war-like relish. These stories were not told in terms of rights and wrongs very much, though my grandfather was radical enough; Carlyle’s
Past and Present
fitted his view. The stories were told with a pride in conflict itself. Hard masters were as much admired as recalcitrant workmen; the quarrel, the fight, was the thing. The fight was good because it was a fight. Granda’s youth was speaking when he told of this.

The Ten Commandments, of course, came into my grandfather’s stories, particularly the commands to honour one’s parents—though of mine he clearly had a poor opinion—because that led to obedience; then stealing the old lady’s Halma pieces, the allure of apples, raspberries and Victoria plums. Finally murder. About murder he was vehement. It attracted him; he seemed to be close to it. I felt I must be close to it too. I had a younger brother whose goodness (I jealously knew) was palpable. How easily I could become Cain. To the question “Cain, where is thy brother Abel?” how glad I was that I could honestly reply “Uxbridge, near the canal,” though I had once tried to push him into it. Granda kept on year after year about murder. When I was nine or ten and the famous Crippen cut up his wife and buried her in his cellar, Granda made me study the case thoroughly. He drew a plan of the house and the bloody cellar, for me to reflect on. He had a dramatic mind.

In the summer my grandparents took a holiday, paying for it out of a few preaching engagements. We took the train across Yorkshire to the North Riding. For the first week we would stay with my Great Uncle Arthur and his wife Sarah, who was my grandmother’s sister. After the placid small town life of Sedbergh, York was a shock. We were in an aristocratic yet industrial city. The relations were working-class people. The daughters of the tailor in Kirbymoorside were expectant heiresses in a small way, but both had married beneath them. Very contentedly too: the difference cannot have been very great and was bridged by the relative classlessness of the north—relative, I mean, to life in the south.

We arrived at one of an ugly row of workers’ houses, with their doors on the street, close to the gas works, and the industrial traffic grinding by. A child could see that the minister and his wife thought themselves many cuts above their York relations. Great Uncle Arthur was a cabinet-maker in a furniture factory. The minister glittered blandly at him and Uncle Arthur looked as though he was going to give a spit on the floor near the minister with a manual worker’s scorn.

Great Uncle Arthur was a stunted and bandy man, with a dark, sallow and strong boned face. He looked very yellow. He had a heavy head of wiry hair as black as coals, ragged eyebrows and a horrible long black beard like a crinkled mat of pubic hair. A reek of tobacco, varnish and wood-shavings come off him; he had large fingers with split unclean nails. The first thing he did when he got home from work was to put on a white apron, strap a pair of carpet knee-pads to his trousers, pick up a hammer or screw-driver and start on odd jobs round the house. He was always hammering something and was often up a ladder. His great yellow teeth gave me the idea he had a machine of some kind in his mouth, and that they were fit to bite nails; in fact, he often pulled a nail or two out of his mouth. He seemed to chew them.

Uncle Arthur’s wife was Grandma’s eldest sister and in every way unlike her. She was tall, big boned, very white faced and hollow-eyed and had large, loose, laughing teeth like a horse’s or a skeleton’s which have ever since seemed to me the signs of hilarious good nature in a woman. Though she looked ill—breathing those fumes of the gas
works which filled the house cannot have been very good for her—she was jolly, hard-working and affectionate. She and Uncle Arthur were notorious (in the family) for the incredible folly of adoring each other. She doted on her dark, scowling, argumentative, hammering little gnome: it seemed that two extraordinary sets of teeth had fallen in love with each other.

For myself, Uncle Arthur’s parlour, Aunt Sarah’s kitchen and the small back yard were the attractions. The back yard was only a few feet square but he grew calceolarias there. It gave on to an alley, one wall of which was part of the encircling wall of the city. Its “Bars” or city gates, its Minster are the grandest in England and to Uncle Arthur who knew every stone in the place I owe my knowledge and love of it. One could go up the steps, only a few feet and walk along the battlements and shoot imaginary arrows from the very spot where the Yorkists had shot them in the Wars of the Roses; and one could look down on the white roses of York in the gardens near the Minster and look up to those towers where the deep bells talked out their phenomenal words over the roofs of the city. They moved me then; they move me still.

Uncle Arthur’s house had a stuffy smell—the smell of the gas works and the railway beyond it was mixed with the odour of camphor and camphor wax. The rooms were poorly lit by gas jets burning under grubby white globes; air did not move easily, for there were heavy curtains in the narrow passage-way to the stairs. But the pinched little place contained Uncle’s genius and the smell of camphor indicated it. The cabinet-maker was a naturalist—he used to speak of Nature as some loud fancy woman he went about with and whom his wife had got used to. On the walls of his kitchen hung pretty cases of butterflies and also of insects with hard little bubble bodies of vermilion and green—creatures he had caught, killed and mounted himself. In the lower half of the kitchen window he had fixed a large glass case of ferns in which he kept a pet toad. You put a worm on the toad’s table—one of Uncle’s collection of fossils—and the spotted creature came out and snapped it up.

The smell of camphor was strongest in the small front parlour. A lot of space in the window corner was taken up by another large glass case
containing a stuffed swan. This enormous white bird, its neck a little crooked and sooty, was sitting on a nest of sticks and seemed to be alive, for every time a lorry or a train passed, it shook and—by it’s stony eye—with indignation. In two other corners there were cabinets containing Uncle’s collection of birds’ eggs; and on the mantelpiece was a photograph of Uncle being let down by a rope from the cliffs of Whitby where he was collecting eggs under a cloud of screaming gulls.

Granda was the sedentary and believing man; Uncle was the sceptic and man of knowledge. He had been born very poor and had had next to no schooling. He told me he could not read or write until he was a grown man. A passion for education took him. He took to learning for its own sake and not in order to rise in the world. He belonged—I now see—to the dying race of craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last, he found it: he taught himself to read by using Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He revelled in it.

“Look it up in Burton, lad,” he’d say when I was older. “What’s old Burton say?”

He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument. And he would add, from his own experience, a favourite sentence:

“Circumstances alter cases.”

Burton was Uncle Arthur’s emancipation: it set him free of the tyranny of the Bible in chapel-going circles. There were all his relations—especially the minister—shooting texts at one another while Uncle Arthur sat back, pulled a nail or two out of his mouth and put his relatives off target with bits of the
Anatomy
. He had had to pick up odds and ends of Latin and Greek because of the innumerable notes in those languages, and a look of devilry came into his eyes under their shaggy black brows. On top of this he was an antiquarian, a geologist, a bicyclist and an atheist. He claimed to have eaten sandwiches on the site of every ruined castle and abbey in Yorkshire. He worshipped the Minster and was a pest to curators of museums and to librarians.

In short, Uncle Arthur was a crank. When the minister and he sat
down in the parlour they looked each other over warily. The swan shook irritably in its glass case as they argued and there they were: the man of God and the humanist, the believer and the sceptic; the workman who had left his class and the workman who scorned to leave it. The minister said Uncle Arthur was naïve and a joke; Uncle Arthur regarded the minister as a snob, a manual worker who had gone soft and who was hardly more than his wife’s domestic servant. The minister was prone to petty gossip as the clergy are apt to be. Uncle Arthur said “Let’s stop the tittle tattle.” He wanted a serious row. He puffed out his chest and grinned sarcastically at his brother-in-law; the minister responded with a bland clerical snort. They were united in one thing: they had both subscribed to the saying, often heard in Yorkshire: “Don’t tha’ marry money, go where money is.” They had married heiresses.

I fancy Uncle Arthur’s atheism was weakening in these days, and that he may have been moving already towards spiritualism, theosophy and the wisdom of the East—the philosopher’s melancholy. There was a ruinous drift to religion in these northerners. I did not know that, in this room, there was to occur before very long, an event that would have a calamitous influence on my family but one that would play a part in starting my career as a writer. Uncle Arthur had two sons and a daughter. She was a brisk, jolly Yorkshire girl who was having a struggle with her parents. She was about to be married and, after coming home from work her idea was to go round to the house she and her fiancé had found a few streets away. He would be painting and papering it and she would have more things like fire-irons, or a coal-bucket, to take there. Uncle Arthur and Aunt Sarah thought this might lead to familiarities before marriage and would not allow her to go unless she had one of her brothers with her, but they were rarely at home.

The clever girl saw that I was the answer and petted me so that I was delighted to go with her. I was the seven-year-old chaperon and I fell in love with her. It piqued me that when we got to the house, her young man would spring out at her from the front door and start kissing and cuddling her. “Oh, give over,” she cried out and said “I’m going to marry him,” pointing to me. I did not leave them alone for a minute. A
bed had come to the house and the excited young man soon had us all bouncing up and down on it, rumpling my hair with one hand while he tickled her with the other, till she was red as a berry At last the wedding day came and I was sad. I longed to be with them and wanted to be their child and was sad that I was left out of it. Aunt Sarah teased me afterwards and said that since I was in the photograph of the wedding group, I was married too. This cured me of my passion. For at home in London we had a book, bought by my father, called
Marriage on Two Hundred a Year
which, like my mother’s song “At Trinity Church I met me doom” caused words between my father and mother. I was beginning to form a glum opinion about married life. Why did these tall, adult animals go in for what—it seemed—was nothing but worry?

Uncle Arthur’s eldest son was a tall, sad young man, with puffy cheeks. Whenever I was in York and he was at home he took me out rowing on the Ouse. He was a hero to me for he was a post office sorter who worked on the night mail train to London. He had the superb job of putting out the mail-bags into the pick-up nets beside the line, as the train screamed through at sixty miles an hour.

It was the other son, a lithographer whom I saw only once, who made the strongest and most disturbing impression on me. There are certain pictures that remain with one all one’s life and feed disquieting thoughts. I was taken to a poorish house in the winter one evening and there he sat, a pallid and ailing man, with blue circles under his eyes, with medicine bottles beside him. Several young children were playing on the floor: the mother was giving the bottle to a new baby. There was—to me—the sickly smell of young children which I hated, for being the eldest of my family, I had often to look after my brothers and sisters when they were tiny. This second cousin of mine was very ill, he had lost his job as a lithographer because of his illness, and looked as if he were dying. In fact, he was no more than a nervous sickly dyspeptic, one of the victims of the Yorkshire diet of pastry, cakes and strong tea; and my grandfather said with disapproval that he was an artist. One was shown a lot of people in Yorkshire who were “warnings”: after the picture of Crippen the murderer in the papers, there was the town drunk of Sedbergh, the town fighter, the town gambler.

This cousin of mine was the warning against the miseries of art, unwise marriage and failure. (When I was eighteen I wanted to be a painter and the sick smell, above all the sensation of defeat and apathy in that room worried me.) Years passed. I must have been about eleven when father brought home the news that the dying Cousin Dick had been suddenly and miraculously cured by Christian Science.