Читать книгу Follow My Dust - Jessica Hawke - Страница 11

SIGNING RENT BOOKS

I

Upfield’s last school, with the exception of the ‘crammer’, was the High School, then a modem innovation of higher degree than the National Schools. The building was airy and exceedingly well equipped. All the masters held degrees, and all wore caps and gowns. The mistresses, for it was a mixed school, also wore caps and gowns. The children who passed to this school encountered an entirely new atmosphere.

For one thing, contact between master and scholar was not as close. Corporal punishment in public, administered by every teacher, was at this school something of a rite, and smacked of refined torture. The delinquent was ordered to report to the headmaster. He had to stand outside the door of the headmaster’s study, and as the head often took a class in English Literature the offender might stand outside that door for anything up to an hour, more often than not being joined by fellow criminals.

They would wait and twist and nudge and wait. This waiting was especially trying for boys possessed of imagination. To see the headmaster appear at the end of the corridor, approaching with mortar- board set straight and gown flowing, was to see a figure which in later years was to become known as Dracula.

One master really loved was the science teacher. He was short, sharp-voiced, and a Welshman. He was old-fashioned and human. He gave his class to understand that there were only so many minutes to this period and certain work must be done. The work could be accomplished quickly, and were it so, a supplementary experiment would be permitted. As the supplementary was the manufacture of a new stink, or a new method of creating an explosion, the set work was invariably completed well ahead of time.

The little Welshman never sent a boy to the headmaster for punishment, save for something really serious. He would confront the offender, saying: “So you would delay us! So you would distract our attention!” And with that, his palm across one’s cheek would cause it to burn for hours.

The universal opinion was that the greatest bore was English Literature, this being the subject name on the curriculum. The examples of English Literature chosen by the headmaster were taken from Scott, Lamb, Shakespeare, and the boys had, in turn, to stand and read aloud. There was no information imparted about the authors, which might have given a human interest to the study of their works. There sat the headmaster on his dais, aloof, impersonal. He created a gulf across which he never met his pupils, and they could not reach him. Without doubt he was an extremely successful chief executive, yet a junior teacher at a National School could achieve better results. It is safe to say that Scott, Lamb, and even Shakespeare were never read by any boy after leaving that school.

Arthur attended the High School for three years. He entered at Form IV, and he left when in Form IV. During his second and third years he topped the class in History and Geography, and was invariably at the bottom in every other subject. Set him a paper on the Battle of Agincourt, and he would still be writing enthusiastically when the bell went. Check the dates, and more often than not they would be wrong. Ask him a fool question such as: “If a man walks ten miles at ten miles an hour, and has a fit in the third and seventh miles, how long will it take him to walk round Trafalgar Square?” he would occupy the allotted time with noughts and crosses. But all would be well if he had to draw a map and outline Drake’s First Voyage.

During this period, when fourteen and fifteen years of age, there grew and was completed a hand-written manuscript of some 400 foolscap pages. It was properly set out in paragraphs and chapters, punctuation was reasonably accurate, and the total wordage worked out at 120,000.

Of course, the subject of the story was fantastic, being a voyage to Mars. The mechanics were crude, the grammar was a maze, and the spelling worse. There wasn’t the faintest possibility of its ever being published. But it wasn’t a task, it was a joy. It was not compiled, all 120,000 words of it, with anything in the author’s mind but the joy of accomplishment, the necessity of giving out generated by the fire within.

Once when he was convalescing from bronchitis, the father walked into his son’s room, about eleven at night, and found him writing by candle-light. The doctor visited him and found him writing. The father kindly urged the boy to go to bed; the doctor picked up several sheets, read, looked strangely at the patient before making the usual examination. The brothers knew about the book. They listened to each chapter as completed.

But the schoolmasters knew nothing. One or more of them would have sought for the cause of his contempt for spelling. The little Welshman would have talked to him about that tremendous writing effort, would have read it, and pointed out that to become a real author Arthur would have to tackle spelling seriously. Most of the boys entered the dockyard as artificers. Many joined the Navy, where the demand for intelligence was ever increasing. Some went on to a ‘crammer’ and sat for the Civil Service. One there was, the son of a poor widow, who eventually became a famous naval architect, and another became a draughtsman in the offices of the famous yacht builders, Camper & Nicholson. Two boys were aces. They topped the entire school. They acquired knowledge with the ease of master minds. They went up like rockets; and at the age of eighteen or nineteen they fell back like sticks. It is the tortoise that arrives.

2

There was an uncle who looked like Mr. Pickwick, or would have done had he shaved regularly. When Uncle Charles strode on to the stage where young Upfield was beginning to strut, the imitation Mr. Pickwick was retired from his business of manufacturing flags, and had developed a great passion for exploring historical places and pubs.

Arthur was deputed to be his guide and general informant. It was assumed that as Arthur’s school reports invariably placed him as a student of history he must know everything of historical interest in Portsmouth and Gosport. Still, as Uncle Charles’s guardian he learned a great deal of history not mentioned in the books.

The first expedition had, of course, to be to the Victory, Nelson’s flagship moored off the Gosport shore of the harbour.

To make the voyage it was necessary to engage a wherry, an open boat manned by an old salt, duly licensed and waiting in all weather. An ex-Navy man around eighty years old was introduced to Uncle Charles. He had a remarkable growth of short whiskers reminding one of a baby’s bib. He wore a shiny peaked hat, and it was his habit to remove this headgear and run a forearm across the peak as though to polish it.

“Is that boat safe?” asked Uncle Charles, and this was futile, because there were at least twenty boats exactly alike.

“Sir, as safe as the old Victory herself,” replied the ancient. “Now you just step down into her and sit yourself on this here cushion, and you’ll fancy yourself aboard the Victoria and Albert.”

“Hey there, Jude,” shouted a ferry captain. “Don’t you forget to bring the top-’at back.”

This brought a long tirade from Mr. Jude, who sat resting on the oars and obviously enjoying himself. Uncle Charles produced a note-book, and proceeded to jot down the salient points. It was a purple performance, and when done, the wherry owner calmly lit his pipe, took up the oars and rowed with stately rhythm.

The harbour this day was particularly busy. A battleship was on its way down the Channel, two destroyers were coming up from the entrance, an Isle of Wight steamer was circling from the railway pier. And hither and yon sped the small steam ferries. What with all this and Nelson’s mighty flagship looming ever higher over the tiny wherry, it could be expected that Uncle Charles would not think to ask and record the answers to the following questions.

“How old are you?”

“Eighty-one,” replied the wherryman.

“You have been a wherryman all your life?”

“Exceptin’ those times I served in the Navy, mostly in furrin’ ‘parts.”

“How long have you had this boat?”

“Well now.” The mariner rested to spit on one horny palm and then the other. “Well now, it must be nigh on twenty-seven years.”

“Then you have done well, remarkably well. Take a nip.”

The tide was running out, so that whilst the mariner paused to take a mouthful of whisky from the old silver flask, he had lost two hundred yards. Instead of the journey occupying barely twenty minutes, it took the wherryman almost an hour to reach the Victory.

They were received at the top of the gangway by a reservist, who , conducted them down below to the gun decks, and finally to the brass plate in the deck marking where Nelson fell. Uncle Charles removed his hat whilst he read the inscription. Then he wanted to know from which side of the ship had come the bullet from the marksman in the Frenchman’s rigging.

The return voyage was made swiftly and without further incident, but when again on land, Uncle Charles insisted that the mariner accompany them to the nearest pub, where the two men imbibed rum straight.

To what purpose Uncle Charles employed his notes never leaked out. The expedition to the Blue Post Inn added much information to the record. Here, of course, Midshipman Easy spent a night or so before boarding his first ship, but Uncle Charles demanded to know just where the famous midshipman slept, and on being told that this fact was not precisely known, he addressed himself severely to mine host. Having sampled several glasses of old ale–almost the colour of port wine, and hiding a dirty camel’s kick–he was conducted to the old harbour, in the shadow of which the Earl of Buckingham was assassinated. There being no one to answer his questions, he put them to Arthur.

“Why isn’t there a brass plate let into the pavement to mark the exact spot? Merely engraving the particulars high up on the wall of the building, which most probably didn’t exist at the time, is yet another horrible example of the mental slough into which the nation has fallen.”

He was satisfied by the visit to the George Hotel, in which Admiral Nelson slept his last night on shore, for there still stood the four-poster bed in the exact room. Here Uncle Charles spoke in hushed voice to the chambermaid who conducted them upstairs, and reserved his questions until drinking whisky-and-beer in the saloon bar, when he directed them to the bored landlord. What had become of the bedding? Why had not the blankets, at least, been preserved? What had become of the chamber-pots, which, in those days, were universal adjuncts to a

gentleman’s bedroom?

Charles Dickens’s house entranced him for two days, and when the time came to introduce him to the dockyard, Arthur solemnly warned him that if he produced his note-book, he would be run out by one of the enormous dockyard policemen–without his hat.

The lower end of the High Street, Old Portsmouth, was then occupied by the establishments of junk dealers, ship chandlers, marine engineers, fusty gentlemen engaged in an extraordinary variety of commerce, and a range of hostelries which in their heyday had been patronised by seafarers, from admirals to midshipmen. Here and there along the east side of the High Street there were openings in the brick and stone frontages guarded by ancient cannons partially sunk into the ground to prevent the passage of wheel traffic. Some of these ‘holes in the wall’ led to wide courtyards fronted by tall and narrow houses in which the history of twenty decades was written on the very walls. Similar exits from the High Street gave access to the stone walls and wharves of the old harbour, which was busy with small ships when Portsmouth was non-existent and Gosport merely a collection of fishermen’s huts, in the day of King Alfred.

Once he penetrated to these places Uncle Charles required a deal of shifting. It never concerned him of whom he asked his eternal questions–a woman whitening her doorstep, a retired pirate, a sailor off a Spanish onion boat, the captain of a sailing craft that had brought tulip bulbs and roses from Holland.

3

Then there was Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam was a solicitor’s managing clerk. Like Arthur’s mother, he spoke with the soft accent of Birmingham, and if Uncle Charles looked like Mr. Pickwick, Uncle Samuel was the image of Mr. Snodgrass.^*

 Biographer’s note: Questioned on this likeness of his relatives to Dickens’s characters, Upfield assured me that Dickens’s characters were like them, and that their counterparts could be met with almost any day of the week. He assured me that within forty miles of Gosport, that is, away from the coast, many of the people in the villages spoke what was almost a foreign language, and that to see them going to church and chapel on Sundays was to observe every character ever portrayed by Charles Dickens.

Upfield’s Uncle Sam possessed an extraordinary mind, and why he never entered politics and rose to occupy the Woolsack was matter for speculation. Uncle Sam’s great interest was literature, the ‘literary’ kind. He could read the leading article from The Times, drop the paper, and voice it word-perfect. He could recite without error Shakespeare’s every play. He could quote every proverb from the Bible. And, in conversation, one never could be quite sure of the source of much he habitually inserted as asides.

An author had to be dead at least a hundred years to find favour with Uncle Sam, yet he eagerly requested to be allowed to read the great English novel written by his nephew. On returning it, he wrote: “Continue. Let nothing deter you. Be not sidetracked by the lure of wealth through filthy commerce. Press on and write, write, write. You have a great talent, but, Great God! polish that talent with the abrasive of William Cobbett.”

4

Upfield had never heard of William Cobbett, save that he was a renegade of recent times and therefore unworthy of a place in history. Now approaching his sixteenth birthday, he had no views concerning his future and revealed no decided aptitude for a career. It was now that the aunts stepped in with the ambition of the grandparents that Arthur should become a doctor. A doctor! This goal was referred to the headmaster, who doubtless raised his superior brows and called on his own talents to be diplomatic. Frustrated, clinging to the ambition of the eldest son being one up on trade, the father was induced to article the son to a firm of estate agents, auctioneers and surveyors, for three years–and might just as well have thrown his hundred guineas into the harbour.

Thus did Arthur Upfield enter one of the professions.

The firm’s offices were on the ground floor of an office building where was the editorial office of the local newspaper, and shortly after he became sixteen Upfield wrote a long letter to the editor on the subject of Tariff Reform. That the letter was edited before publication did not lessen the thrill, and Upfield waited for indignant opposition. No irate pro bono publico taking the trouble, Upfield then wrote a strong letter, refuting the claims in his first, in favour of Free Trade. This, after severe editing, was also published.

Only now did Upfield decide what he would like to be–a newspaper reporter. But, said the aunts, there was that fee of a hundred guineas, there was that most respectable business career, a profession. A newspaper reporter! Great Heavens! Mixing with criminals and visiting public-houses and the like! In the career chosen for him he would not have to associate with such low types.

Little did they know, little could they have understood.

Observe the youth! A scrawny figure in his first long-trousered suit. Passably intelligent from the nose up, weak from the nose down. Aged sixteen; a one-hundred-thousand-word novel locked in his desk; not one examination passed; all the world opening like a glorious flower, the history of a great Empire printed on the petals, and the scent carrying the romantic essence of a dozen foreign countries to his questing mind. A youth striving to fly without wings. The first adventure into love in ruins, and the broken melody now the accompaniment to the writing of the second great opus.

His first assignment was the collection of rents, there being many hundreds of properties where rent had to be collected every week. He was inducted into this business by another youth who had served his articles, and the one overriding rule was speed.

It meant knocking on a door, waiting for the tenant to answer, signing the tenant’s rent book, giving change, and noting the entry into the firm’s rent books. After a few weeks the routine was mastered. The town and suburbs were cut into divisions, and you began at one end and carried on through street after street, into alley after alley, until you reached the other end. By then trousers and coat pockets were loaded heavily with coin, from sovereigns to halfpennies, and no filthy paper.

When calling at a terrace of houses, the collector banged on the first door, went on to the second and the third, and so on, and on his returning to the first the tenant would be waiting with the book and the money. To each tenant a cheery greeting. To some a chiding for falling into arrears, to others the hint of drastic action by the terrible, flint- hearted boss in the office. The rents were from three shillings and sixpence up to ten shillings, the houses ranging from slum dwellings, some filthy with fleas, to others as spick and span as the deck of the Victory, up to quite commodious semi-detached houses.

The tenants became the collector’s friends–and what a field of psychology they were to the embryonic novelist! Many would anticipate his call, knowing to the minute when his knock would sound at the door.

There was Mrs. Black, whose rent was six shillings and sixpence a week. Her husband was a sailmaker. She worked as a milliner. There were no children, but a bed-ridden mother occupied an upstairs room. The front door would be unlocked. The rent and book would be on the table in the front room.

Arthur would arrive, burst in through the latched front door, calling: “How are you today, Mrs. White? When are you going to stop being lazy and get up?” “Oh, I’m about the same, Mr. Upfield. I hope you are well.” A pause at the foot of the stairs to gossip for just a moment, then into the front room to snatch up money and book, make an entry and rush out again calling “Goodbye, Mrs. White, till next Monday. You’ll be up by then. No more pretending.” Slammed door, and again the long silence for Mrs. White.

Then one Monday it happened. Arthur pushed open the door, called up the stairs, received no reply, rushed into the front room. The table wasn’t where it always had been. Resting on two chairs was a coffin with the lid off, and Mrs. White lying amid flowers. The precipitate entry flung Arthur against one of the chairs. The coffin slipped off at that end and the corpse partially slid out.

There was the sound of movement at the rear of the house, and frantically Arthur pulled the body up into the coffin and lifted it to rest on the chair. When he turned from the room, the daughter was in the passage with money and rent book.

“Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Upfield. I hope. . . I hope you didn’t get a shock, like.”

“I’m all right, Mrs. Black. It was a bit of a shock…I didn’t expect…I’m so sorry. I’ll miss Mrs. White.”

“Thank you, Mr. Upfield. Don’t go. Come and have a cup of tea.” A man appeared behind her, the sailmaker. He said: “Yes, and with a drop of doings in it, too. Oughta had that door locked. Come on, young feller. I got real Jamaica what only the Navy gets.” He saw to it that there was more rum than tea.

Then there was Mrs. Pafford, whose husband had been shop-man to the grandmother’s sisters in the butchery business. She lived in a house once owned by Arthur’s grandfather, still the property of the family, and never had she paid any rent. She was large and white-faced, now old and slightly bent. The house was one of six in an alley, and every Monday afternoon young Upfield duly knocked at the door. Mrs. Pafford would open it, having, of course, examined the caller from behind the front room curtain. That Pafford! He was out of work. Or he had been drunk all the week-end. Or he had fallen and hurt himself and was up at the doctor’s. The collector would make a cross in his book, smile and chide Mrs. Pafford for not making the attempt to pay even threepence of the weekly rent of three shillings and threepence. Hopeless for the agents to suggest distraining to the owners.

“Ah, yer pore grandma, Mr. Upfield,” Mrs. Pafford would moan. “What a lovely lady! And those pore dears wot ran the butchers! Saints they was an’ all. That Pafford cried when they was took. The blackguard won’t do no crying when I’m took. Ah. . .”

So it would go on as the collector hurried to the next house. And one day Mrs. Pafford really enjoyed herself.

There was a new clerk to be inducted, and he was taken around and introduced to the tenants. On his arrival at Mrs. Pafford’s house it was some time, and only after the third knock, that she opened the door, suspicion plain in her black eyes.

“This is Mr. So-and-So, Mrs. Pafford. He will be calling for the rent in future. Will you please let him see your rent book?”

“See me rent book!” shrilled Mrs. Pafford. “You want to see me rent book, Mr. So-and-So.” She lifted high the front of her dress, revealing nothing under it, and said: “There’s me rent book, Mr. So-and-So. Sign it.”

When a house fell vacant, it was Arthur’s duty to make an inventory of necessary repairs and pin a ‘To Let’ notice in the window. In those days tenants were not killed in the rush, but reasonable care had to be taken that a house wasn’t let to ladies of easy virtue. Their money was good and prompt, but owners were averse to having their property named in the press as disorderly houses.

Still, they often got past the chief clerk, and were given the keys. At first when Arthur called for the rent, a demure miss would open the door, proffer the book and money, say “Thank you” with a friendly smile and close the door. But later the smiles were promising and often Arthur would be invited to take out the rent upstairs. He might have been tempted, but maybe he didn’t dare.

Shades of the grandparents! And of the aunts!

There were all kinds of houses, from the vermin-infested dwelling to the large residences fronting the harbour or opening to the Square; the latter type having had as tenants admirals, ships’ captains, and before them retired pirates, gun-runners, and looters in foreign wars. Many a famous seafarer had rented one of these houses to instal a mistress.

There was a house near Trinity Church where no one stayed long, and when a tenant paid to have his lease terminated and left, Arthur was sent to make a careful list of renovations deemed necessary, with special attention to the drains.

It was a very spacious house, overlooking the church, and even then the neighbourhood was peaceful and old-worldly. W. W. Jacobs put the local characters into his stories. It was of four floors and built in the reign of George I. The wide stone steps to the front door were strong enough to guard a castle, and the iron door-knocker was a leering devil daring you to touch it. Inside, you found yourself in a large hall, with a beautiful mahogany-railed staircase leading to the three upper floors. The sun, on the day that Arthur visited the house, poured wine- coloured radiance upon everything in that hall-staircase and bare floor.

Furniture sales always began at the drawing-room and ended in the kitchen, and Upfield followed this routine. The drawing-room needed re-papering. The ceiling would pass. The window-frames required cleaning and repainting. And so on. From the ground floor up the stairs to the first floor, all very quiet and sun-filled and warm and friendly. A beautiful house, a dream house, to be dream-filled again with the glorious furniture which had passed under the hammer when Arthur was acting as auctioneer’s clerk.

As he passed up the stairs to the second floor, a coldness caused Upfield to look back and down. He proceeded, and worked through the second floor and went on to the third floor, and there he stood at a window from which he could see over the harbour entrance and watch the sleek form of a destroyer going to sea.

Quite abruptly the view meant nothing at all. His back felt as though bare flesh was pressed to ice. There was nothing in the room. Only the sunlight slanting through the dust motes and laying a golden pathway on the floor–to the door.

Then brave Horatio, who had stalked his brothers in the dark, bolted down all those flights of stairs and out through the front door, at which he paused only long enough to lock it with the great heavy key.

His employer wanted to know why he hadn’t completed the inventory. What were the drains like? The water service? The condition of the kitchen and the cellars and the domestic quarters? It was all extremely silly.

The senior clerk was sent to complete the inventory. He noted the drains and the condition of the domestic quarters. But he didn’t stay on the third floor long enough to do anything about the rooms there. It was a job which had to be done, so they returned to the house together. They entered the hall, and then decided to note the repairs necessary to the top floor with the aid of imagination, and the real sunlight on the front steps.

5

During the articleship, young Upfield was supposed to pass three annual examinations: the first year entrance exam to the Auctioneers’ Institute; the second to earn the Associateship; and the final to become a Fellow.

The first examination would be on a par with the present-day Intermediate, and to study for this, Arthur had to attend a crammer’s school twice a week. The first year, in addition to studying, he wrote his second hundred-thousand-word novel, based on the invasion and conquest of Europe by the Yellow Peril. The Yellow Peril won hands down. Nothing stopped it, but it stopped Arthur passing that examination. He tried again the following year, but during that year he had to write the sequel, wherein the Yellow Peril was flung back, and so he failed again.

It was no effort whatever to study routes from China through Tibet, Samarkand, and on to the Bosphorus, defended by the united navies of Europe. Quite a pleasure.

At seventeen, young Upfield was still supposed to be studying, but he had become aware of girls. At eighteen the girls held top place. Studying was something unpleasant and invariably mentioned only by his father. Even the novel-writing faded into quiescence.

Interest in girls was foreseen by the father of five boys, himself not inexperienced at Arthur’s age. He had received sound advice from his father which now he handed out to Arthur as a good fellow, and man to man. He said one night when the others had gone off to bed:

“There is no doubt that you are the greatest fool of the family, in fact the greatest fool of an Upfield I’ve ever met or heard of. You’ve cost me a lot of money but I cannot see you ever deriving a penny value from it. Where you are going I don’t know, and I’m sure you don’t either. Both of us know where you are not going, and that destination isn’t success, measured by any kind of stick.

“The point I want to make clear is that should you cut your throat we must not be spattered by the blood. If you will remember three wise sayings, you will save us from much worry, and yourself from disaster and sorrow. One: never play around with girls in your home town; do so in a distant place where you aren’t known. Two: never make a promise in writing. Three: if you can seduce a girl before marriage, others may seduce her after marriage.”

On another occasion he said:

“I’ve seen you with the same girl at least six times in the last three months. Remember, what the mother is today, the girl will be twenty years hence.”

Upfield’s first experience with a woman took place in a horse-drawn cab at Southampton, which is twenty-odd miles from his home town. He was then a trooper in the Hampshire Carabineers Yeomanry, and the walking-out dress consisted of a dark blue tunic with chain epaulettes, and skin-tight trousers with a wide white stripe on the outside and strapped under the insteps. All this was a distinct hindrance to illicit love-making, and the experience in the cab was discouraging. The fact that at this time contraceptives were not adjuncts to handbags and pocket-wallets was conducive to morality. Then there was that primary influence over him exerted by the grandmother and the aunts, which was actually a pointer that women were to have a far greater influence on his life than men.

Great-aunt Lucy lived in a Sussex village and had never married. With a sister she had taken over her father’s business, and had accumulated enough money to retire under comfortable circumstances. She was verging on ninety when Arthur spent his first holidays with her, a little Dresden-china woman with bright blue eyes, a wonderful smile, and understanding heart, and always good for a substantial tip at the end of the visit.

Her house was of brick, consisting of two storeys, enshrined with ivy. It stood in about an acre of enclosed garden, and quite near was the well-kept village green, where cricket was played as it ought to be played. A housekeeper-general-nurse, with her husband and a son of Arthur’s age, occupied the rear portion of the house.

Great-aunt Lucy did not approve of the newfangled motor-cars. She did not approve of certain relatives. When speaking of either, a slight flush would creep into her beautiful face, as though even to disapprove was un-Christian. Arthur’s quick friendship with the housekeeper’s son gained her approval, for she loved this boy.

Over lunch, the little china lady would relate anecdotes of her early years, and describe with vivid phrase and twinkling eyes the idiosyncrasies of her relatives. Dinner was always at six o’clock, and at eight there was a rigid routine.

At eight, when the sun was setting and the birds were loud in song, she would call Arthur from his book in the garden, and he, obeying, would find her seated at the table in the morning-room with the family Bible in readiness for the evening reading. Her voice was not unlike the voice of the bird beyond the open window, and, despite his failings, Arthur listened with respect and with interest. Following the reading, he listened to a short homily, also with respect, and when the Bible was reverently closed and placed at the head of the table, Aunt Lucy would say:

“Now, Arthur, our glass of wine.”

Arthur would produce the glasses from the cabinet, and the decanter containing cowslip, dandelion, or rhubarb wine, bottled by the little lady twenty or thirty years before. When a new bottle had to be brought from the cellar, Arthur was commanded, with a smile, to keep whistling all the time he was below.

As eight-thirty was announced by the ormolu clock on the mantelshelf and the grandfather clock in the hall–and they always chimed in unison–the great-aunt would rise, and Arthur would offer his arm. Thus they left the room to mount to the landing above, where the housekeeper would be waiting to take the little lady to her room.

On Sundays, morning and evening, Arthur conducted the great-aunt to the chapel close by. Sometimes they went for short walks in the late afternoon. Sometimes a carriage was hired and they would drive into the neighbouring countryside.

But after the ritual of conducting the great-aunt to the first landing, the gossamer chains drifted, and Arthur would join his pal, to race away on bikes, or gather with the lads and lasses under the oak trees bordering the Green.

One morning the housekeeper went into the great-aunt’s bedroom with morning tea, and found her kneeling beside the bed. She had died praying.

6

The year that King George V was crowned, Arthur’s father decided he had had enough. His other sons, two of whom were now in his business, were agreeable to complying with the elastic rules of the home, but Arthur’s behaviour was much less conservative. His father said:

“You are going out to Australia to try farming. I have come to look on Australia as the ideal country for you. It is so far away that you will never save enough money to return.”

How right he was!