Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 3

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The earliest recollection, perhaps, is of being on board a ship at sea in a fog. There was a good deal of bustle and excitement, bells ringing and sirens blaring and folk running about—very much to the taste of a small boy aged two and a half, but not to his mind indicative of anything really untoward. I was somewhere at the ship’s side, peering through an opening which the first officer had had closed with string network for my especial benefit; before that precaution had been taken I had been in the habit apparently of hanging most of my small self out over the Mediterranean. Exactly whereabouts in the ship this entrancing opening was is more than I can say now. If I were to trust to my memory I should call it a porthole, but that only goes to show that my memory is distorted by later recollections. Presumably it was some sort of opening in the bulwarks.

Anyway, as I knelt there and fiddled with the network the fog suddenly lifted, almost as dramatically as the curtain rising at a theatre. That, too, was not specially marvellous to me; the most ordinary and the most extraordinary things are on much the same plane of the marvellous to the two and a half year old mind. We were at the entrance to Malaga harbour—there was a glimpse of hills and houses to be seen. Plenty of small boats were manoeuvring round us; a couple of hundred yards away or so a big steamer was aground on a sandbank: we were aground on the same sandbank, which sufficiently accounts for the bustle on board, but that meant nothing to me. Presumably it meant something to my mother, who was on board with a considerable number of her children—three at least and possibly five, all under thirteen years old; I do not know how many of my brothers and sisters were with us.

In fact I do not remember anything else to do with that voyage—I cannot say what on earth a passenger steamer from Egypt was doing at Malaga, nor how we got off the sandbank, nor what the rest of the journey was like. But that one recollection is vividly clear. Moreover, if ever nowadays I smell the peculiar sharp scent of tea made with condensed milk the whole picture of the hills and the houses and the wrecked steamer is conjured vividly up before my eyes in an instant. I suppose a canny steward was allaying panic among the women passengers by serving out cups of tea, and in those days—1901 or so—fresh milk was unobtainable in small Mediterranean steamers.

Presumably the next recollection is of a time a month or two later. It shows a very small boy who could walk upstairs but not downstairs, standing outside a small house in Camberwell and finding the world a very strange place. I was all bundled up in woollen clothes and mufflers and things—very odd after the tussores and linens to which I was accustomed—and yet I was conscious of a new and most unpleasant sensation. What was the matter with me was cold, the raw cold of an English February, which was something quite out of the run of my previous experience, for the only two winters I had ever known had been passed in the benign sunshine of Egypt.

Moreover, the house decorators to whom I was talking were to my mind being extremely rude in not understanding what I was saying to them. That is easily explainable to me now, for I was persisting in addressing them in Arabic. I could speak English as well, of course—probably better—but to my mind then people of the social order of house decorators could not be expected to understand anything except Arabic. I told those house decorators over and over again that they were doing their work all wrong, that brick houses were not nearly as nice as white stone ones with walls two feet thick, that the smell of size and varnish was objectionable to me, and that I did not like England and was going straightaway with my mother to find a steamer back to Egypt; but they only laughed.

They laughed until more house decorators arrived, and among the newcomers was a man who had served in the English army and who had fought at Tel-el-Kebir under Wolseley. He actually managed to remember a few words of Arabic—that is another instance of unexpected memory, because Tel-el-Kebir was fought twenty years before—and when he used them my sorrowing heart was comforted. What he said I cannot remember and cannot possibly imagine—what Arabic words which an English Tommy would pick up in the Cairo bazaars could possibly be of use in a conversation with a two and a half year old?—but whatever it was it reassured me until at last he was able to get me out of the men’s way and indoors to where the warm-hearted Irish maid could take charge of me, and offer me the warmth of a kitchen fire and a wooden horse on wheels in exchange for the charcoal braziers and camels of Cairo.

The last I heard of that maid she had risen to the surprising position of cook to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and I suppose no other raw Irish girl has made a similar success of life in the last thirty years. And she deserves every bit of it too. My regret is that His Eminence, ex officio, cannot possibly have any children or grandchildren to wander down into his kitchen and say ‘I’ll block up the pathway, Maggie’ as I used to do, and ask infantile questions about boiling kettles and roasting joints. It would be nice for His Eminence, and I strongly suspect that Maggie would still like it, and I am quite sure that the grandchildren would.

That winter in Camberwell must have been a depressing period, all the same. I can remember my mother weeping over the cracked chilblains with which her poor hands were covered; and I have heard—although I did not observe it at the time—that our Camberwell neighbours refused to notice my mother’s existence. It was far too suspicious, to their minds, that a strange woman should turn up from foreign parts with five children and no apparent husband. They turned up their noses and passed her on the other side of the street—whether my mother would have been glad if they had done otherwise is more than I can say. It must have been a dreadful time for my mother, spending her first winter in England after fifteen years of Egypt—fifteen years of warmth and sunshine, of willing servants and pleasant social life. Khedivial balls and Nile trips—arriving in a small suburban house with one maid; embarrassed with five children, and tormented by the cold and by the chilblains.

However, my memory is not burdened with recollections of that period, for practically the next picture I can recall is of being helped up into my high chair at the breakfast table and saying ‘I’m three today, I’m three today’ and feeling very satisfied with myself in consequence; that must have been several months after our arrival in England. A week after my third birthday I went to school.