Читать книгу A Traveller’s Life - Eric Newby - Страница 13

In the autumn of 1928 I was sent to Colet Court, the Junior School of St Paul’s which stood opposite it in the Hammersmith Road. By a quirk similar (but not the same) to that which locates Harrods in SW1, when everything else in Knightsbridge is in SW3, Colet Court was in Hammersmith W6 and St Paul’s in West Kensington W14.

As if to emphasize the connection between the two schools the architect or architects, who were obsessed with this material, had embellished both sets of buildings, which were constructed of purple brick, with what seemed like acres of shiny, orange terracotta. A large part of my schooldays were spent in these disturbing surroundings, which suggested some more restrictive uses than seats of learning, and it was quite common for boys waiting outside St Paul’s in the evening for a bus to take them home to be approached by some stranger, often a foreigner, wishing to know what kind of ‘institution’ was this enormous pile of Victorian Gothic in the Hammersmith Road, and of what sort were the inmates. Eventually, after some exceptionally earnest or morbid sightseer, wishing to see and know more, had enquired at the porter’s lodge, an order was promulgated to the effect that when such a question was posed by a member of the public we were forbidden to say that the place was a ‘loony bin’.

A photograph probably taken in 1929, in the summer term of my first year at Colet Court, shows me, at least after the extensive retouching to which it had been subjected, to have been a healthy, cheerful-looking boy with large, protruding ears and a large mouth full of very slightly protruding teeth.

Because my ears stuck out (whichever ear I slept on flapped over on itself, like an envelope) at night when I went to bed I was made to wear what were called ear-caps. They were made of cotton, had what looked like miniature fishing-nets on either side to keep the ears against the head, and were kept in place with a couple of bits of ribbon tied under the chin. Just as a hairnet or a bath cap imparts to the wearer an excessively senile or infantile appearance, according to whether the wearer is old or young, so did ear-caps, and for this reason I was extremely sensitive about wearing them, just as I had been sensitive, years before, about wearing red rubber waders on Bournemouth beach. These ear-caps proved to be useless for restraining ears as powerful as mine. After a few days my ears broke through the netting, and after I had worn out something like half a dozen pairs in a month, according to my mother, I was made to wear something more robust that looked like a pair of metal earphones with leather ear-pads in place of phones. However, these were so uncomfortable that I eventually refused to wear them at all, in spite of having been ‘given the slipper’ by my father to encourage me to do so. After this nothing more was done about my ears, as nothing was done about restraining my teeth, and eventually ears and teeth returned to where they should have been in the first place, of their own accord.

This photograph, my last studio portrait for many years, was taken by Mr Spencer, whose studio was in an early Victorian villa next door to St Paul’s School, and it was he who had been responsible for photographing me ever since I first sat up, unaided, and wore nothing but a loincloth.

It was Mr Spencer – a mild, pleasant man who used to wax the ends of his moustache into needlesharp points with the aid of a preparation called Pomade Hongroise, an operation which he once performed for my benefit at my earnest request – who first engendered in me an interest in photography, although a number of years were to pass before I had the opportunity to gratify it. Mr Spencer’s camera was a massive affair, made of mahogany and brass, which used glass plates. When he was going to operate it he used to put his head under a black velvet cloth and gaze into a ground-glass screen on which whatever he was photographing appeared upside down, which must have been disconcerting until he got used to it.

Mr Spencer had various backgrounds against which one could be photographed: woodland dells, palace balconies, simulated sunsets, that sort of thing. He could even paint in gnomes and fairies, and did so in one unforgettable picture of me, with a fringe and aged about four, wearing a pale blue knitted-silk round-necked pullover and shorts to match. Much to my disappointment, apart from the picture with the gnomes and fairies, which I do not think she herself could really have liked, my mother always insisted that whatever background I happened to be taken against should be eliminated, so that I invariably appeared in the finished portrait against a white or sepia nothingness.

Another important piece of equipment, with which Mr Spencer used to keep his younger sitters in good humour, was a little, brightly feathered bird, which spent the time in a small box when it was not called upon to play its part. Whether it was a real bird that had been stuffed, or an artificial bird, it is difficult to say; but the entire contraption came from France.

‘Watch for the dicky bird!’ Mr Spencer used to say, with his head under the velvet cloth, just before he was about to take a photograph, at the same time squeezing a red rubber bulb which caused the bird to pop out of the box and utter a few chirrups before disappearing.

Every morning in term time for my first two terms at Colet Court, I walked from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the back streets of Hammersmith to school. On these journeys I was usually escorted by Kathy. My mother was often away now, travelling with my father. We did have a cook-housekeeper at this time called Mrs Hartland, who was large and puffed a lot. Mrs Hartland was more or less a facsimile of poor Mrs George, who had walked into the river by Hammersmith Bridge with her umbrella up. However, the walk to Colet Court, even if she came back by bus, would probably have done Mrs Hartland in. In the evening Kathy used to meet me and bring me home by bus.

All these rather complicated arrangements were necessary because my father insisted that I should walk to school each day, rain or shine, instead of being taken there on a bus from Ther Boiler, until I was considered old enough to travel by myself. ‘The exercise will do him a power of good,’ he used to say, as if I was some obese person who otherwise might spend the rest of the day with his feet up, instead of what I was, a rather skinny little boy who spent quite a large part of each day playing football, cricket, learning to box, training for sports day or else roaming around the playground with a friend pretending we were Sopwith Camels shooting up Fokker triplanes, doing our best, by keeping on the move as rapidly as possible, to avoid the gangs of bullies with which the place was infested.

‘Breathe in deeply,’ he used to say, ‘when you’re crossing the bridge.’ And because this, too, would do me good, I did, inhaling the Thameside air and the nasty smells which came from a municipal rubbish tip and Manbre & Garton’s saccharine factory which made the whole of Barnes stink when the wind was in the wrong quarter.

Once, that first winter, there was a pea-soup fog, a thicker version of the one in which, what now seemed long ago, we had returned to Barnes in the electric brougham from Pimlico, a sort that later, when I became interested in crime, reading the ghosted memoirs of ex-policemen from Boots Subscription Library, I associated with Jack the Ripper. In spite of its density I went to school just as if it had been any other day (something my mother would not have allowed if she had been at home, for such fogs were a menace to health, killing off innumerable people), despatched on this perilous journey by Mrs Hartland, who was much too much in awe of my father to countermand his orders.

Armed with a cap pistol for self-defence, holding Kathy’s hand, something I would not have done in broad daylight in case some other boys from Colet Court saw me and pulled my leg about it, both of us wearing woollen mufflers over our mouths that – until they were washed – reeked of sulphurous soot, looking like a couple of robbers, we groped our way over the bridge and into Hammersmith in what had become overnight a void in which one could see nothing, except where here and there a gas lamp in the street produced a sickly yellow incandescence. In it we could hear the coughs and footsteps of other passers-by without seeing them until they were actually on top of us, the groaning of vehicles in low gear and the hoarse cries of men on foot armed with acetylene lamps who were trying to guide them through the murk. Eventually we arrived at school half an hour late, to find that those boys who had succeeded in getting there had already been sent home and, to my delight, repeated the whole adventurous process the other way round.

These narrow streets through which we made our way, now long since destroyed by wartime bombing or knocked down to make room for housing estates and flyovers, were where the poor lived. They even had the sort of names that, when I was older, I learned to recognize were reserved for the streets of the poor; because whoever was responsible for naming them, such as the official who named Fanny Road in Barnes, knew that it did not matter what sort of names they were given as the poor would never object to living in, for example, Distillery Lane W6.

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavour.

At one of these street corners there was a pub, taller or made to appear taller than the houses by a large sign with the name of the pub and the sorts of beer it sold inscribed on it in gold lettering, and curved to wrap around the angle of the building. In the morning, when we passed, it smelled of stale beer and sometimes the brewers’ draymen could be seen, enormously potbellied, purple-faced men, wearing leather aprons, lowering barrels with a rope down a shiny wooden chute from the horse-drawn drays, or else, having completed the delivery, drinking the first pints of the day they were entitled to as ‘perks’. (Some of these men drank as many as sixteen pints a day ‘regler’, according to a Watney’s drayman I met in the 1950s.)

And there were shops as minute as the houses – smaller, in fact, in terms of living space because they were houses in which what had been the front parlour had become the shop. They sold things that I was not usually allowed on the grounds that they would be bad for my teeth or my immortal soul, such as what my parents considered to be ‘vulgar’ comics; more vulgar, but not in the sense of being ‘rude’, than the Magnet and the Gem, both of which I was allowed and both of which Kathy enjoyed reading to me as much as I enjoyed listening, much more vulgar than the Children’s Newspaper, which because of its virtuous nature I already found boring. It was a useless prohibition anyway, as I could always borrow one of these more vulgar comics – ‘I say, man, if you let me have a go of your comic you can have a go of my liquorice strip’ – from other less watched-over boys at school.

Bad for the teeth were: lemonade made with lemonade crystals, much more delicious in my opinion than real lemonade; toffee sticky enough to pull out entire rows of stoppings; gobstoppers, huge sweets like musket balls that changed colour and the colour of your tongue progressively as you sucked them; sherbet imbibed through liquorice tubes from cylindrical yellow packets that looked like fireworks (oddly enough I was allowed liquorice); toffee apples that always had a thin layer of dust on them that had blown into the shop from the street outside.

Embedded in the pavements at some of the street corners there were cast-iron bollards, shaped like muzzle-loading cannon with imitation cannon balls stuck in their imitation muzzles, against which old men could usually be seen leaning, wearing cloth caps, white silk mufflers or red-spotted neckerchiefs and suits of what even to me seemed antique cut.

In 1927 the poor looked much poorer than they do today, in Hammersmith or in any other part of London. Their everyday clothes in those days, before sponging and pressing and dry-cleaning became commonplace, looked as if they had been slept in. For working men, manual labourers who lived by the sweat of their brows, there was no such thing as winter or summer clothes. A working man wore the same suit all the year round, except on Sundays. In summer, if it was really hot, he might discard his jacket, hardly ever his waistcoat, even though the cloth from which such a suit was made was often thicker and heavier than that used to make a present-day overcoat.

Because of this the poor often smelt. It was not a term of derision as it usually was at Colet Court. ‘Yah, you smell!’ Although some boys there did smell. It was a fact. One only had to travel, as I sometimes did to my great delight, on one of the tall, two-storeyed tramcars that used to sway down King Street from Hammersmith Broadway with bells clanging, like sailing ships rolling down to Rio, on my way to visit my Auntie May at Stamford Brook, or else travelling down Shepherd’s Bush Road en route with Ellen to visit an uncle of hers who had a boot repairing business in Goldhawk Road, to know this smell for yourself, a bitter-sweet odour that a modern traveller, Laurens Van Der Post, identified some thirty-five years later (in connection with the Russian proletariat, en masse) as the smell of soiled clothing, left and forgotten in a laundry basket. A bath was a tub half-filled with water from the copper in which the weekly wash was done. A wash was a lick and a promise in the kitchen sink.

I took more notice of the children of the poor than of the grown-ups, because they were nearer my level in the world in terms of feet and inches, and therefore more often confronted me. I remember the boys more than I remember the girls because the boys tended to move about in gangs. I remember them, not all of course, but many, as being pale and thin, some of them almost transparent, so that looking at their faces with the skin drawn tight over them and their cropped, sometimes shaven heads above, I had the impression of being able to see their skulls through the skin.

But, although some were painfully thin, with bulgy, raw-looking knees protruding below the ungainly-looking shorts they wore, cut down from the discarded trousers of their elder brothers, they were tough, as tough as those of their fathers who had survived the war. Among themselves they fought like ferrets, on the pavements, in the gutters, anywhere, not caring what damage they did to one another or their already tattered clothes, putting in the boot, as it is now called, when they were able, employing methods that at Colet Court were regarded as unfair, except by the gangs of bullies whose techniques surpassed anything the poor could think up at that time in terms of the infliction of physical pain. Their parents fought, too. Their fights were not the lightning affairs their children were adept in, as if they were torpedo-boats racing in to an enemy anchorage and doing the greatest amount of damage in the least possible time and then getting out again. They were lumbering, major actions between what were more like dreadnoughts, that went on until one or other of the participants was rendered hors de combat, or until the police arrived. Such encounters in the streets of Hammersmith were awful to watch, at least to me, because the idea of grown-ups of whatever condition, who were presumed to know better, actually fighting one another, pulling great tufts of one another’s hair out sometimes if they were women, was unthinkable.

The children of the poor, boys and girls alike, were resourceful. They had to be. Apart from marbles and iron hoops they had scarcely any bought toys; or if they had they must have kept them indoors as I never saw any. They tied lengths of ragged rope to the crossbars of the street lamps and swung on them, or else used them for skipping. In the autumn the boys played conkers, as we did at Colet Court, bashing away at one another’s iron-hard, specially cured horse chestnuts on a string until one or other of them broke. They also played various street and pavement games, such as hopscotch, according to the season of the year, marking out the courts with chalk. If I and my friends used to chalk out the same games on the pavements in Riverview Gardens, residents complained and we got ticked off by the porters, who were numerous. What I envied them were the scooters and little carts, made for them by their fathers or elder brothers, using wood from old packing cases and wheels from discarded roller skates. These scooters made what to me was a wonderfully deafening noise as their owners scooted along the pavements or, more daringly, along the road. I thought them far superior to my own bought scooter from Hamleys which, although possibly a little faster, was depressingly noiseless, being fitted with rubber wheels. In the little carts, which were almost equally noisy, they used to pull their younger brothers and sisters, most of whom should have been in prams if they had had prams, all the way from Hammersmith up Castlenore to Barnes Common and back, a couple of miles each way. How these infants survived such jolting journeys is a mystery.

They were brave, too. In summer, when it was high tide at Hammersmith, some of the boys who could not have been more than nine or ten, used to dive into the then indescribably filthy water from the parapet of the bridge, a good fifteen feet above it, and then, never having been taught to swim properly, dog-paddle to the embankment. They used to do this until a policeman, or a policewoman wearing a helmet like an upturned basin, a huge blue serge skirt and big black boots, used to appear and chase them into Hammersmith, still naked, clutching their ragged clothes, but never catching them.

Besides being tough, resourceful and brave they were also, so far as I was concerned, and anyone who travelled the same route to school as I did, extremely nasty. In the summer of 1928, for the first time I was allowed to go to school without Kathy, providing that I travelled by the back street route, avoiding Hammersmith Broadway, in which my parents were always convinced that I would be run over. Sometimes, but not always, I travelled with another boy who lived nearby us, whose parents bound him to the same conditions.

To us, the perils of this back street route were far more real than any of the risks our parents imagined us running in Hammersmith Broadway, such as being knocked down by a bus or tram. It took us through the heart of territory in which the poor and underprivileged lay in wait while on what appeared to be their more leisurely way to their own schools. Travelling with Kathy, herself a member of the working class, I now realized was like having been provided with some sort of laisser passer. In any event, she stood no nonsense from anyone and on the only occasion she did have trouble, when what seemed to me a very large boy, one as tall as she was, crept up behind her and pulled her long hair, she gave him such a resounding slap in the face that he went off howling. Now, using the same route, we encountered the enemy, an enemy waiting to jeer at us, shove us about, smash our straw hats in or pinch our caps, according to the time of year.

If there were only a couple, and they were not too large, we used to stand and fight. We were quite good at fighting, in fact, for much of the time we did little else in the breaks at Colet Court, and quite often we succeeded in sending them away blubbing. Surprisingly, for all their ferocity, they seemed less able than we were to put up with physical pain.

If we did win such a victory, however, our triumph was usually short-lived. No later than the next day we would find ourselves the subject of a major ambush by members of the same tribe. This could be very serious unless we happened to be armed with cricket bats, or even school satchels would do if they were sufficiently packed with books, to bash the boys with. Otherwise the only thing to do was to run for it: capture meant torture, even if it was only of an improvised, not very refined sort, which it more or less had to be in an open street. (At Colet Court, where there were places hidden from view in the playground, to which few masters ever penetrated, torture could mean having drawing pins pushed into the palms of one’s hands.) Even so, we sometimes arrived at school, ourselves blubbing, with bloody noses and straw hats stove in and, worst of all, late, in which case we were reported. It is perhaps not surprising that when things got really bad we took to crossing Hammersmith Broadway by the forbidden route.

However, these misfortunes were soon forgotten travelling home to Ther Boiler in the evenings on top of a No. 9 or 73 open bus, bombarding other boys on the tops of other buses with peashooters or squirting water pistols at them; whistling at the girls from St Paul’s Girls’ School, with whom social intercourse while travelling was discouraged; hiding under the canvas covers, which could be put up over the seats in wet weather, to avoid paying the fare; or better still, waiting for the buses of the Westminster or Premier pirate bus companies, that were fighting a battle for survival against the London General Omnibus Company. Their drivers used to shoot ahead of the sedate red Generals at a tremendous rate and scoop up all the customers, so that, when the Generals arrived, which had to observe a time schedule, the passengers were already half way home. The pirates had no ticket inspectors to speak of, and often their conductors used to let schoolchildren ride free.

But these early back street encounters were as nothing compared with the risks one ran when one was older and was required to wear the ludicrous uniform decreed at St Paul’s – black jacket, striped trousers, stiff white collar, black tie. In winter, boys who had attained a certain height wore bowler hats and carried rolled umbrellas.

These last two items, although they conferred a certain, barely tangible, status on those who wore them in the company of their fellow Paulines, had the reverse effect on those wearing them all alone, for example in the Hammersmith Bridge Road.

By this time, aged fifteen or so, it did not matter whether I went to school by way of Hammersmith Broadway or the back street route wearing such an outfit. There were just as many possibilities of being elbowed, tripped or jeered at on the bridge itself (a nasty place for ‘an encounter’), or in the Hammersmith Bridge Road, by what I now recognized were no longer schoolboys but semi-grown men. I now walked to school from choice, finding it too much of a bore to queue up for a bus at Ther Boiler in what was always the rush hour when I set out.

Although the penalty for not wearing a hat, whether a bowler, a school cap or a straw hat, was quite severe (a beating usually administered by a prefect), I preferred at this age to be beaten rather than draw attention to myself by wearing any of these sorts of headgear, just as by this time I was prepared to risk punishment for talking with girls I knew from St Paul’s Girls’ School on their way home by bus, some of whom also removed their hats but for a different reason – because they were good-looking and did not want to look like schoolgirls.

The only good thing about this crazy outfit was the umbrella. Less lethal than a cricket bat (with which if you hit someone really hard you might easily kill him), the umbrella, used as one would use a rifle with a bayonet or as an outsize truncheon, rather like those carried by the mounted police, was an ideal weapon.

Uncivilized as my behaviour may seem today, in a more squeamish but much more dangerous age, I can only plead that I had no choice. The penalty of defeat or, even worse, capture, would have been by this time much more serious than anything I experienced at Colet Court.

As a result of this misuse, my umbrella and those of my schoolfellows who found themselves in similar situations soon became useless for the purpose for which they were intended, either failing to open when it rained and they were needed, or else opening and falling to pieces.

These journeys from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the streets of Hammersmith altogether continued for eight years of my life (not including the period when, as a small child, I attended the Froebel kindergarten in Baron’s Court). In me they engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger and despair that some nineteenth-century travellers experienced in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the Central Highlands of New Guinea. And even today and now with even more reason, I sometimes experience a chilly sensation when walking alone down a narrow south London street.