Читать книгу As It Happened - Clement R. Attlee - Страница 6

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I was born on January 3, 1883, the seventh child and fourth son in a family of eight. My father was a solicitor of high standing in the City of London. For many centuries the Attlee family have lived in Surrey. The county historians say that the family lived at Effingham, where there is a Great Lee Wood from which our name is derived. For many generations they had lived at Dorking, carrying on business as millers, corn merchants, and farmers. The old mill existed until recently, and the family business still continues. My grandfather, who was born in 1795, had a family of ten children. Two sons succeeded to the family business, two were brewers, and one a clergyman. My father, the ninth child, was articled to solicitors in London when he was sixteen and eventually became head of the firm and president of the Incorporated Law Society. I had many cousins on my father’s side; two were well-known doctors, several girls became missionaries.

My mother was the eldest of six girls—daughters of T. S. Watson, secretary of the Art Union of London. My grandmother died young, and T. S. Watson was the only grandparent still living when I was born. Among my mother’s ancestors were a number of doctors, one of whom was a fashionable practitioner in the eighteenth century in Soho.

My grandfather went to Westminster School and Caius College, Cambridge. He left a diary of his early life in which this incident is recorded. When he went to Cambridge his father made him promise not to join the Boat Club. Apparently, in the 1830s, these clubs were considered to be dissipated. However, at the instance of a fellow old-Westminster boy, he compromised by not joining the club but rowed regularly in the College Eight.

My grandfather lived with four daughters and one son, who were all unmarried, in an old house on Wandsworth Common—The Gables—which formed an important part of the background of my childhood, for my aunts and my uncle were always very kind to all of us. The Gables was an old Queen Anne house of very distinctive character. One part of the house had been made semi-detached and was inhabited by three old ladies, the Misses Bellamy. The family lived mainly in the drawing room, which was furnished with an old gilt tapestried suite which sold very well a few years ago. There were many glass “lustres” on the mantelpiece. The dining room was very dark. We were intrigued by its window, which was placed over the fireplace. The other rooms on the ground floor were rather full of furniture and books and were more in the nature of passage rooms, though one was more or less appropriated to Aunt Edith. Upstairs there were great four-poster beds. Aunt Janet’s room was very jolly—it had a hob grate with Dutch tiles, deep window seats, and a shining mahogany wardrobe; I see it most clearly in the firelight of a Christmas evening when we used to dress up to act a play. There were little closets giving off it, used for washing and pervaded by a general smell of Pears’ soap. I just remember the smoking room in my grandfather’s time. There were no curtains and, I think, no carpet, and there were swords and daggers on the wall. There was a big room upstairs, belonging to Aunts Emma and Edith, which had a very wavy floor and fascinating cupboards that we always thought ran a very long way down into the house. I spent four weeks when recuperating from some ailment in this room—perhaps I was merely in quarantine—but I got to know it well.

There was a large smoky garden with a big cedar tree surrounded by a great circle of ivy, a tennis court cut off by an old brown brick wall, and a fascinating greenhouse and sheds. Uncle Alick did a good deal of pottering in the garden. He was, from our point of view, an ideal uncle, as he had a pleasant habit of sending us out to buy his “baccy” with the injunction to spend the change on sweets.

Our family lived in Putney, which was then quite an outer suburb of London. Market gardens stretched between Putney and Wandsworth. There were big houses with fields and farms near at hand. We were close to Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, while the fields began quite close to Wandsworth High Street. This street had still the aspect of a country town with numerous queer little “pubs.”

We had a roomy house with a good-sized garden in quiet, leafy Portinscale Road. We were, I think, a typical family of the professional class brought up in the atmosphere of Victorian England. There were eight children in our family, separated conveniently, from the point of view of remembering ages, by a uniform two-year interval. Two boys came first, then three girls, and then three boys.

All the boys were educated at Haileybury College, a school of which my father became a governor, and at different colleges at Oxford. The girls, however, were taught at home by a succession of governesses. There was, I think, some prejudice against girls’ schools. Dorothy and Margaret went to Karlsruhe in Germany for a year for a finishing course.

We younger boys were brought into contact with our sisters’ governesses. One of them was French, and from her I learned to recite fables of la Fontaine with an admirable French accent, but this, with other nonsense, was speedily knocked out of me when I went to school. Another, Miss Hutchinson, who taught my sisters for many years, had previously been employed by Lord Randolph Churchill to teach his little son, Winston, whom she described as a very determined little boy. She could never have thought that the two little boys were destined in turn to be Prime Minister. A story was current in our family that one day a maid came into the room and asked Miss Hutchinson if she had rung the bell, whereupon young Winston said, “I rang. Take away Miss Hutchinson, she is very cross.”

We were a happy and united family. As one of “the little boys,” I was brought up with a great reverence for my seniors, who, it seemed to us, had attained a standard of virtue which we could never hope to approach.

Early days remain fresh in the memory, and I can still recall very clearly the atmosphere of those times. Standing in our garden, one could hear the roar of London traffic as the horse hoofs beat on the paved streets. I recall the dust in summer and the mud in winter, the occasional ride in a hansom cab and the more frequent one in the dusty, musty four-wheeler with straw on the floor. I recall our annual visits to the seaside. The first, I remember clearly, was a visit to Lowestoft when I was two years old. Later on we went often to Seaton in South Devon. I remember many features of those days which have long since disappeared—crossing sweepers, German bands, Frenchmen with tame bears.

The first public event I recall was the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, which I celebrated by putting out a flag on the porch of our house.

An annual event of great importance to us was the University Boat Race, for the Cambridge crew used to stay in the house next door to us. We fervently supported Oxford and always hoped that one day the two crews would meet in the street, when, if they followed our example, there would be a fight. Any visitor to our house was at once asked, “Are you Oxford or Cambridge?” Our general view was that the Universities existed solely for the purpose of this race.

Our family were strong supporters of the Church of England and Sunday was strictly observed. There was much church-going, special reading, and no games. Walks were the only relaxation on Sundays, though this puritanism was later relaxed.

Until I was nine I was taught by my mother, who was very well read. My brothers Tom and Laurence went to day schools in Putney, but for some reason I was taught at home. I learned to read early and was a voracious reader. Our house was well stocked with books, and I roamed widely among them, being especially fond of poetry.

My father was a Gladstonian Liberal, but the rest of the family was Conservative, with the exception of a great-uncle, who was a Chartist, and my uncle Simmonds, who, it was said, was the only parson in the diocese of Hereford who shared the Liberal views of his bishop, Dr. Percival. When I was young the Irish Home Rule controversy divided families, and a tactful mother generally tried to change the subject when political affairs threatened to come up in conversation.

At the beginning of the summer term of 1892 I joined my brother Tom at a preparatory school at Northaw Place, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, kept by an old friend of the family, the Reverend F. J. Hall. I was rather small for my age, having indeed been overtaken in height, much to my chagrin, by my younger brother Laurence. The school was accommodated in a fine old house standing in extensive and beautiful grounds and contained between thirty and forty boys.

Hall himself was a mathematician, while his assistant, the Reverend F. Poland, was no scholar, and the other assistants who came from time to time, B. M. Humble and Alan Clover, had not been trained to teach and were not qualified to give other than fairly elementary instruction.

There was one large schoolroom and a classroom. The various “sets” worked at forms or tables in the large hall and were called out to stand in a line when the “set” was taken in Latin “construe,” those not called out continuing their work through the noise. A great deal of time was devoted to the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, and one left with a meticulous knowledge of the Kings of Israel and Judah. The history of the Jews was taken straight through from Joshua and Judges to Ezra and Nehemiah. It is incredible the amount of time wasted in acquiring this useless knowledge, for there was no critical exegesis at this time. It was all holy writ.

Geography and history were taught in the usual manner of the time, mainly a list of facts. The teaching of the classics was thoroughly bad, so that those who went from Northaw found themselves handicapped as against the boys who had been to schools where the masters understood how to teach and knew their subjects. On the other hand, the care taken of the boys was immense and the amenities of the place delightful. Mrs. Hall, who managed the commissariat and looked after the health and comforts of the boys, was an extremely competent person. An old Scotswoman, Mrs. Ross, was a kindly matron. The food was excellent, the grounds open to the boys extensive and beautiful, and I certainly had a very happy time there.

The real “religion” of Hall and Poland was cricket. The ideal in life was to become a first-class county cricketer; the holy of holies, the pavilion at Lord’s. Throughout the summer we played cricket every afternoon. In the breaks and at odd times during the day we practised with cut-down bats and rope balls, in the paved stable yard and in the gravel yard. In the evenings in the schoolroom we played “paper cricket,” dabbing with a pencil on a paper marked with runs and cricket happenings, and scoring the results against the names of members of rival teams—not infrequently the Kings of Israel and Judah, the former being always captained by Jehu on account of his driving prowess. We knew the names and scores and the likenesses of all the principal cricketers of that epoch, headed, of course, by W. G. Grace, then at the height of his renown. I never was much use at the game. A good field, nothing of a bowler, and a most uncertain bat, I hovered on the edge of the team but never got my colours. If the school at Northaw sent out few scholars, it sent out plenty of good cricketers, for Hall and Poland were both skilful performers and painstaking instructors. As a nursery for producing gentlemanly professional cricketers the school could hardly have been bettered.

In the winter we played rugger, which had not then taken its final form. The number of halves and three-quarters was still experimental. Except for matches against other schools, the whole school played, the surplus over the fifteen on each team being added to the scrum, while Poland and Humble, both very big men, also played in the scrum. Though very light and small, I got my colours fairly early as a forward, but later developed into a halfback. Hall, despite his age, played rugger regularly with the boys until he was well over fifty, for he had been nearly first-class and had always kept in training. I remember a match against Bengeo School when our opponents, an exceptionally large-sized lot, scored ninety-two points.

During the breaks in the winter and Easter terms we played “blackthorn,” a form of prisoners’ base, either in the yard or round the garden. For a time this was superseded by “bushrangers,” when certain boys would be the robber band and lie in wait in what was called “the jungle” (a narrow path that ran round the field) for the approach of “the coach” made up of other boys.

Nostalgic memories, mostly happy, flood my mind as I think back: the noisy, crowded, gas-lit schoolroom on a winter’s evening with the dust hanging in clouds; a slide made with two forms placed against the top of the four-decker lockers down which small boys are glissading; one or two of the quieter boys making messes with ink at the tables, others nib-fighting or playing “paper cricket,” whilst all over the schoolroom continual scuffles are taking place; Sunday evenings in the beautiful drawing room scented with rose petals where boys are singing hymns and carols while Mrs. Hall plays the piano; the hard winter of 1895 with snowballing and when we were able to skate on the pond almost until April; warmer days, when round the same pond we fished for dace and perch, sailing boats or adventuring with Humble in a very leaky punt made in the carpenter’s shop; basking in the sunshine on the lawn between the house and the old gates with one of the boys reading Uncle Remus aloud; long, lazy afternoons during cricket matches, meticulously keeping scores and bowling analyses while we lay stretched on the grass drinking ginger beer, which was always provided on these occasions; the freshness of the dewy garden and the smell of the potting shed from which Dodson, the gardener, might, under great pressure, produce an apple; interminable futile idlings of the small boy trying to tightrope-walk along the iron railings that separated the park from the yard; walking round the Hertfordshire lanes, including, on Sundays, visits to an opulent neighbour, Mrs. Kidston, who provided an orange or an apple for each boy; pillow fights in the early morning in the big dormitory with its six beds, one (known as the “Iron Pirate”) with an iron superstructure designed for curtains and originally intended for the use of the Young family, but upon it we performed gymnastics—often in a quite literal sense, for it was the age of nightgowns. These and many other memories remain young in my mind.

I well remember being ill and confined to a spare room in the Master’s part of the house and being a long time in the dark, too shy to get someone to bring a light. There was, too, the misery of mumps. Laurence and I both suffered in this respect and were proudly the most swelled of anyone, largely through being sent out for a walk while an east wind was blowing.

Two of my contemporaries at Northaw have had distinguished political careers. Hilton Young, later Lord Kennet and Minister of Health in Ramsay MacDonald’s last administration, was head boy when I entered the school. I always remember an act of kindness by him. I had some slight illness and was sitting alone with a dull tea of only bread and butter. He came by and, seeing my position, fetched me his own private pot of jam. Years later, when I was in the government, I was able to do him some slight service, whereupon he wrote, “It seems that if you cast your jam upon the water it will, like bread, come back to you after many days.”

William Jowitt, later to become a distinguished lawyer and Lord Chancellor in the Labour government, was put in my care when he came to Northaw as a new boy. We had no presentiment that years later we should be colleagues in government or that he would marry one of three pretty little girls who lived next door to us at Putney.

In the Easter term of 1896 I went to sit for my entrance examination at Haileybury College. I remember very well that Hall bought me a newspaper to read during the train journey across Hertfordshire; in it was a vivid account of King Menelik’s defeat of the Italians at the Battle of Adowa. I little thought then how much that distant country of Abyssinia would occupy my mind in the days when I was to lead the Opposition in the House of Commons. I passed my entrance examination and was placed in the top form of the Lower School.