James Hilton: Collected Novels (21 page)

George’s own ambitions, even if he should ever become both a Member of Parliament and a Bachelor of Arts, had never permitted themselves to soar as far as being “a famous Englishman.” But for Martin…why not? What obstacles were there? Surely not boyhood in Browdley, since winning scholarships was no harder from there than from anywhere else. Perhaps Martin might win such scholarships—not to Harrow (for George, though he could admire some of their products as individuals, was of the opinion that public schools encourage snobbery), but to Oxford—or Cambridge, at least. That faint preference in favor of Oxford was nothing but a recollection of Gladstone’s Double First.

There came a day when Martin seemed old enough to be taken by his father to the Browdley Town Hall, there to imbibe some vague first impression which George could hardly seek to clarify at such an early age, but which would later, he hoped, inspire the lad to an interest in civics, local government, the history of his country, the parliament of man, and the federation of the world. (After all, there was no limit to the effects of a child’s first impression.) So George held the boy lovingly in his arms in front of the rather bad stained-glass in the main lobby of the Town Hall—stained glass depicting a woman carrying some sheaves of wheat in one hand and what looked like a coffee grinder in the other (“mechanical power,” it was supposed to represent); he hoped Martin would at least notice the bright colors. And in due course the child’s eyes rounded with all the excitement, nay more than the excitement that George had hoped for, but unfortunately those eyes were not on the stained glass at all.

George looked down and saw a large rat scampering across the Town Hall floor.

He was horrified, not only that the child should have seen such a thing, but that such a thing should exist; it argued bad drains or something—he would certainly bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Building Committee.

But Martin was by no means horrified. He knew nothing about rats, but perhaps he thought that what he had seen was some extremely swift and fascinating kind of pussycat (for pussycats
were
known to him), and with this to wonder about the visit to the Town Hall did indeed enshrine an experience.

Martin loved his father less than his mother and perhaps even than Becky, but George did not mind this, reflecting magnanimously that the balance would be evened up later on. After all, it was a result of the physical contacts of mother and child, the domestic routine, the humble, serio-comic intimacies; and Livia made a perfect mother—unexpectedly so, indeed. It was as if all the nonsense that cropped up so often in her behavior with adults were resolved into complete naturalness between herself and Martin; she never raised her voice to him, or was angry, or even irritated. In an odd way she gave the appearance of being with the boy in his own world, rather than of looking into it from hers; perhaps there was a sense in which she had never grown up herself, or perhaps it was just the animal quality in her that George had noticed before, that extraordinary paradoxical knack of being shameless and fastidious at the same time. When George came upon his wife and child romping together, he sometimes felt that to make them even aware of him was an intrusion, the breaking of a lovely spell, and he would tiptoe away rather than do this; for again he was able to fortify himself by thinking that his own time would come later.

One night, as he sat with a book in his study, the impulse came to write something that might, if anything untimely should happen, be a help to the boy or at least a reminder that a man had once existed who had dreamed things about him and hoped things for him; and in this mood, rare because of its slightly melancholy flavor, George wrote:—

Everything depends on childhood, Martin, and if you ever have children of your own, remember that, just as I, remembering my childhood, intend to make yours good to remember. When I was a boy of seven my parents died and I went to live with an uncle who kept a newspaper and stationery shop in Shawgate, and living in his house gave me, I think, the germ of all my later interest in printed things—perhaps even in politics too, because it so happened that at the time of my arrival there was an election in progress, and Uncle Joe, who was a Liberal (the only thing he had in common with my father), sent me out to distribute hand-bills. All I had to do was to walk about Browdley slipping them under doors and through letter boxes, yet I don’t think the world was or ever could be more wonderful to me than during those few weeks. I kept hearing about some mysterious person called the Candidate, who was opposed in some mysterious way to another person who was called the Other Candidate, and it seemed to me that the great battle of Good and Evil was being fought in the streets of this town, and that I and my uncle were soldiers fighting it. I suppose it was then, before I really knew what things were all about, that I had the first hankering that made me later decide to go on fighting the same sort of battle when I grew up. And if that’s a strange reason for a young man to enter politics, then perhaps it isn’t the real reason, but just the flick of a button in the signal cabin that can send a train to any one of a hundred different places.

But of course all that was years ago—and in another age, because 1914 was really the end of an age. It was not only that things happened differently before then—they happened to people who
felt
them differently. Take chapel-going, for instance. If you had walked up Mill Street almost any Sunday forty years ago, you would have seen from the notice board outside that William Boswell was to preach there. That man was my father. It would be a cold, raw night, maybe, with mist peeling off the moors, but the folk who wanted to hear him wore hard-wearing stuff; in twos and threes they mustered, till by six o’clock the little gaslit pitch-pine interior was almost full. Punctually on the hour old Jack Slater went to the pedal harmonium (the Methodists of the sect my father belonged to did not believe in pipe organs) and let his fingers wander over the keys according to a style of his own, beginning softly and working up to a great roar, his feet pounding as if he were bicycling uphill to save a life. By this time my father had emerged from the side vestry, Bible in hand, and climbed the steps to the pulpit, where he prayed standing (for the sect did not believe in kneeling or stooping), and announced the opening hymn in the boomingest voice I ever heard. He was a fine-looking man, as you can judge from the photograph in my study; his hands were big and thick-fingered; his hair, black and bushy, crowned a well-shaped head set firmly on broad shoulders. He never drank, smoked, played cards, went to Browdley’s one theater (there were no cinemas in those days), or read a novel or a Sunday newspaper. A life that might have seemed, to an outsider, full of hardships relieved only by boredoms had somehow or other produced in him an air of somber majesty that I could never come to terms with, and I don’t think my mother ever could either. We lived at Number 24, a four-roomed house identical with eleven on one side of it and thirty-two on the other. Parallel with Mill Street stood Jenny Street and Nathaniel Street, composed of houses exactly similar. From the pavement one entered by a single step through the usually unlatched front door; at the back, however, there was an exit through the kitchen into a small paved yard where coal was stored and clothes were hung to dry. I suppose there was no labor-saving device in general use in those days except the Singer sewing machine that, surmounted by a plant pot with or without a plant in it, stood behind the lace curtains in nearly every front window. And there was gaslight downstairs, but not upstairs; and sanitation had but recently progressed in Browdley from the stinking midden to the back-to-back water privy. There were no bathrooms, and baths were taken once a week by heating pans of water over the kitchen fire. I give you all these details because I hope by the time you grow up most of them will be a bit historic—at any rate I hope Mill Street won’t be in existence for you to verify. Mind you, these houses were not slums (as they are today), but typical dwellings of respectable working folk such as my parents were. Respectability even imposed a toll of extra labor, for it was a sort of ritual to wash and scrub the street pavement from the front door to the curb, a task undone by the next passer-by or the next rain shower. When my mother was ill, as she often was during the last years of her life, this necessary tribute to tribal gods was made on her behalf by an obliging neighbor, though I doubt if my mother would have cared much if it hadn’t been. She was a merry little woman with an independent mind uncoupled with any determination to stake out a claim for itself; this made her easy to get on with and rather hopeless to rely on. My father only saw her between six and ten in the evenings (the rest of the time he was either at work or asleep), and during the annual holiday which they took together, always at Blackpool, the strain of trying to seem familiar to a man whose life was so separate from hers made her almost glad when the week was over and she could return to the far more familiar routine of Mill Street. She loved my father well enough, but the emotion of being in love had probably not survived courtship, and by her thirties, with an already numerous family to look after, she had worn her life of household drudgery into an almost comfortable groove. Every morning in the bedroom overlooking the backs of the houses in Nathaniel Street, the alarm clock rang at five-fifteen; without a word my mother would get up, come downstairs in her nightdress, and poke up the kitchen fire that had been banked with small coal overnight. Then she would fill the kettle to make tea, and by the time this was ready my father would be down himself, washing at the kitchen sink and ready to leave as soon as the clock hand approached the half-hour. He was never exactly bad-tempered, but the fact that they were both sleepy made them reluctant to talk; there was, anyhow, nothing much to talk about. A few minutes after he had left the house the whole town resounded with the crescendo of the mill “buzzers,” but by that time my mother was back in the warm bed, content to doze again while the clogged footsteps rang along the pavement outside. To her this pause between my father’s departure for work and the beginning of her own was the pleasantest time of the day—and the only time she was really alone. By eight o’clock she was dressed and downstairs, glancing at the morning paper, making more tea and frying a rasher of bacon for herself. Then came attendance on us children, getting us off to school when we were old enough, and after that a routine of housework and the morning walk along Mill Street to the shop at the corner where nearly everything could be bought, from feeding bottles to fly papers. She would chat there to Mr. and Mrs. Molesworth while they served her; she liked a joke and an exchange of gossip, and often, if the jokes and the gossip were good enough, she would stay talking and laughing until other customers joined in, so that the shop became a sort of neighborhood club for housewives.

Then during afternoons, if the weather were fine, she would put the youngest of us (me, in fact) into a pram and wheel it round a few streets, sometimes as far as the canal bank or the Shawgate shops. Towards four she would be home again, in good time to prepare an evening meal. Then came the second pleasantest interval—the hour in the rocking chair with a cup of tea at her elbow before the children came home from school. While winter dusk crept across the sky, and until the passing of the lamplighter sent a green-yellow glow through the fanlight over the front door, my mother would “save the gas” by poking the fire to a blaze while she rocked and sang. She had a nice voice, small in volume but always true on the pitch, and though most of the tunes she knew were chapel hymns with rather grim words to them, she sang them somehow gaily and with a lilt, breaking off occasionally into a popular song of the moment, something half-remembered from the previous year’s Blackpool holiday, or from summer performances of the Silver Prize Band in Browdley market place.

My earliest recollections, Martin, were of my mother rocking and singing like that. There was a brass rail that ran along the whole length of the mantelshelf, and as I first remember it this rail would shine in the firelight with the shadows darkening all around and my mother’s face growing fainter and fainter as she swung backwards and forwards; till there was only the sound of her singing, the creak of the rocking chair, and the simmer of the kettle on the fire bar…Then, all at once, I would wake up to see the room already gaslit, with my father standing, huge and unsmiling, in the doorway.

I feared my father and loved my mother and that’s about the plain truth of it. On Sundays he locked up all story books, picture books, and even bricks that spelt out words; but while he was at chapel my mother used to unlock them with a key of her own and let me play till just before his return was expected; then she would whisk away the forbidden things with a knowing glance that finally became a sort of joke between us.

That is the home I was born in, Martin—not as happy as it might have been, but not as unhappy either. So I don’t complain of it, but I do want to make
yours
happier. Which is why I intend soon to begin putting books in your way, because the more freely and vividly you see things while you are young, even if you can’t fully understand them, the more actively they will possess you when you grow up—especially if, in adult life, you have hard battles to fight and bitter disappointments to face. New worlds, Martin, are for the young to explore; later one is glad of a new room, or even of a view from a new window…

He put aside the fragment then, thinking he would add to it on many succeeding nights, but he never did; perhaps the rare mood never recurred.

As the postwar slump deepened and unemployment filled the street corners with lounging, workless men, George encountered new opposition to his Mill Street housing scheme. Many of the cotton mills were closing down completely; some of them went bankrupt as catastrophically as had Channing’s a generation before, but without the criminal taint, though the short-lived boom had been pushed by speculators to limits that were almost criminal.