The Day Gone By, Page 3

  One summer afternoon we were having tea on the verandah when suddenly there came the sound of a fairly heavy blow on a pane of the glass at the far end. Though loud enough to be startling, it was a kind of padded thump, as though the glass had been struck by the soft knob at the top of the stick of a gong. We went down to have a look. A lesser spotted woodpecker had flown full tilt against the glass, and now lay, plainly injured, in the flowerbed at its foot. My father picked it up. It was a male, with a red crown to its head, a buff-coloured breast and black-and-white speckled wings. It died a few moments later in his hand. I’ve never seen one since, though I have heard them drumming. (They drum shorter and faster than the greater spotted.)

  Robert Louis Stevenson was right.

  ‘And does it not seem hard to you

  When all the sky is clear and blue,

  And I should like so much to play,

  To have to go to bed by day?’

  On summer nights it was hard to lie down and go to sleep. Mosquitoes or no mosquitoes, the thing was to get out of bed, stand in the twilight and look out of the open window. Immediately below was the wistaria, which covered half the upper storey of the long south wall. Sometimes you could actually lean out, lift up a raceme in your hand and smell it: nothing smells more beautiful. From beyond drifted the smell of night-scented stock or, later in the summer, of the tobacco-plants (nicotianas). There were moths, and bats would be hunting them silently, flitter and gone. Half-way down the paddock, on the left, eastern side, stood a big oak tree, and behind this, in season, the full moon would rise, magnified and brumously honey-coloured in the horizon haze, then turning to clear silver as it climbed above the oak. As often as not, this would reveal a hedgehog grubbing about the lawn or having a go at the left-out remains of the rats’ dinner. Beyond the prunus the dark cone of the cypress tree, from grass to pointed peak, rose still as moss. The tawny owls set out, calling to one another as they went - the first call of four notes, a pause and then the second call of six. I don’t remember that we were ever visited by a barn owl.

  In August the stubbled cornfield would be dotted, in regular symmetry, with the dark humps of the wheat-sheaves piled together in shocks. The oak trees might be rustling, the clouds might be moving, but the sheaves stood completely motionless. Ten years or so later, when I first came across A. E. Housman’s lyric ‘Tell me not now, it needs not saying’, I was at once struck by the lines

  ‘Or marshalled under moons of harvest,

  Stand still all night the sheaves.’

  I drew it to the attention of my father. ‘Pooh!’ he said. ‘What d’you expect them to do - run about?’ It didn’t hurt my feelings. He loved poetry. I felt he had a point; but I felt Housman had one, too. I knew exactly what he meant.

  ‘Here, you ought to be in bed, my boy! You’ll be no good in the morning.’ Or perhaps it would be my mother, a little more plaintive. ‘Oh, Dicky, I thought you’d be asleep!’ And soon I would be.

  They were indulgent, of course, because of the child they’d lost. But I wasn’t to know that. I was spoilt, really: all on account of poor Robert.

  On fine summer mornings, about eight o’clock, there would be ‘pyjama walking’, a splendid institution invented by my father. Bare-footed in our pyjamas, we would walk about the lawn and grass paths of the garden looking at butterflies, flowers - whatever there was to be seen. Ever since, I’ve felt that at this time of day a garden is at its best. How the dew shines! Sometimes my father would bring secateurs and we would cut any particularly good roses we fancied. I learned how to cut a rose - just above the point on the stalk where there is an outward-pointing shoot-bud. Or again, he might bring a stubby little broken knife and we would cut stalks of asparagus, if any were ready. But more often we were content simply to walk about, admire the zinnias, the snapdragons or the asters and then hobble back across the gravel to the verandah, wipe our feet and go upstairs to clean them off in the bath. I loved pyjama walking, partly because my elder brother and sister never went in for it. It remained something between my father and myself.

  Perhaps my greatest excitement came from climbing trees. Heaven knows there were plenty to climb: but I had my favourites. Pines I learnt to distrust and dislike. They were dirty – gummy – and the dry branches were brittle and unreliable. One day a pine branch from which I was hanging by both arms (no footholds) broke. I fell, suffering nothing worse than a nasty thump on the back. But I knew I’d had a lucky escape and after that avoided pines.

  Limes were all right, but again tended to be powdery, sticky and dirty. Not much latitude, either. You just went up – and came down. Dull. The child tree-climber wants to get about in a tree; not just up it. We had no beeches, and it was only later that I discovered the joys of climbing this particular tree. But the horse chestnuts were good, and so was the Spanish chestnut. For some reason the Spanish chestnut had been pollarded, but quite high up – maybe twenty feet – so you could climb to the top and then sit on a kind of flat throne, surrounded by upward-slanting boughs - a bower, in fact. I loved the smell of the Spanish chestnut and delighted in its lanceolate, alternate leaves with their saw-edged ‘teeth’. The round, green, softly-prickly husks of the fruit were pleasant to handle, too: but you couldn’t eat the nuts, whatever people said. They never really filled out and ripened. They don’t, much, in England.

  What a child wants in a tree is breadth; and pliant boughs near the ground, so that he can readily get up into it. There was one tree – a blossoming tree on the western edge of the Wild Wood – which I now know to have been an amelanchier (probably lamarckii, for it was a fair size – not by any means a shrub). The modest spring blossom was near-white and the foliage tinged with red. It had horizontal boughs, springy but entirely reliable. I could be down that tree in seconds, hang-and-drop, hang-and-drop and onto the ground. I used to sit up in it and watch my elders playing tennis, for it almost overhung one end of the court. One summer, using dust-sheets, I made a tree-house in the topmost boughs; but soon dismantled it. It was frowsty: the dust-sheets grew damp and smelly, while on the one hand you couldn’t look out properly and on the other, everyone could see it and know you were there. I called this tree The Thinking Tree. You could sit up there, rocking gently on a pliant branch, and think out your problems – such as they ever were.

  Ah, but the oaks! For the child tree-climber the oak is the acme, the ne plus ultra. The real problem is to get up into it, for a decent oak has a round, branchless trunk going up eight or ten feet. I had to grow older before I could tackle the great oaks along the paddock-hedges. To start with, I had to be big enough to be able to carry a step-ladder down there. (I couldn’t ask someone else to do that.) The only alternative was to try a flying leap at the far end of a lateral branch, but they weren’t low enough for a small child.

  Once up into the fork, what a prospect opened! The tree appeared vast, a world in itself. You could not only climb to the top; you could explore out along each of about five great, lateral branches, as far as they would bear you. That took a whole afternoon. One tree overhung the lane, and you could pelt passers-by with acorns. They took it good-humouredly enough. ‘’Ullo, young doctor; still up to tricks, then?’ ‘You wants come down out o’ that; I’ll give you what-for.’

  If I were put up into any common tree today, blindfold, I think I could identify it by touch and smell.

  My greatest friend at this time was the little girl across the road, Jean Leggatt, whose father was also a doctor. Jean was just two months younger than I, and as babies we had been pushed out in our prams together; she by her dear nursemaid Minnie, and I by my no less dear nursemaid Constance. Constance was a Cripps. Like the Starkadders at Cold Comfort, there have always been Crippses at Wash Common. There were probably some on the touchline at the first battle of Newbury in 1643, and there are some now. I loved Constance dearly, even though she did address me as ‘Baby’: I knew it was from affection. (It certainly wasn’t American: this was before the days of talking pictures.)
I loved Jean dearly, too, and had vague ideas that one day I would marry her. We have remained friends all our lives and she lives not far away now.

  One June afternoon Jean and I were playing in the paddock, when she suggested that we should strip buttercup petals and the little red flowers of the sorrel, and mix them together. It became clear that Jean had done this before: she was purposeful; we soon had quite a nice little heap, which she regarded with satisfaction.

  ‘What do you do with it?’ I asked.

  ‘You throw it at people,’ answered Jean sedately.

  We duly showered Minnie and Constance with this beautiful confetti. They thought it was fun — country girls didn’t have ‘hairdo’s’ in those days: though Constance did enquire whatever the mistress was going to say, for it was ‘regular all over: no gettin’ rid of it.’ She still had some when she bathed me that evening. I can’t speak for Minnie.

  Every first of May, the village children used to black their faces, dress up in such gaudy finery as they could get hold of - the general effect was sort of gipsyfied - and come round with a maypole. This they set up in the front drive and danced round it, singing

  ‘First of May,

  Sooty-bob day;

  Give me a penny I’ll go away,

  All round the ’ouse.’

  As I suppose this must be a genuine folk rhyme, I may as well give the air. (It’s not in Cecil Sharp.)

  From my mother they used to get perhaps twopence or threepence. They couldn’t, however, expect anything from my father. It was begging. His ideas had been formed well before the days of Cecil Sharp, and the preservation of charming old customs hadn’t been thought of - or not in Martock, anyway.

  The carol singers used to come, too. There was no organized carol-singing. Several groups of three or four village children would come during the season (not more than three or four; that would have made the ‘split’ too small). Their repertoire was small, too. ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘Nowell’, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and ‘O come all ye faithful’ were about the size of it. In those days you never heard ‘We Three Kings’ or the partridge in a pear tree. Music in schools has come on a lot since then, of course. Once, I remember, in an Uncle Ernest-like spasm of excessive liberality, I had to be physically restrained from going to the front door and giving the carol singers half-a-crown which someone (Aunt Lilian, I think) had given me early for Christmas. They were quite right to restrain me. It was, in purchasing power, a very considerable sum. It might have been appropriate, perhaps, from the head of a household - though it would have been devilish generous — but from a little boy it would have been downright embarrassing and could only have led the village children to dislike me for a little beast who had all that money to waste.

  I suppose it may have been something to do with my own delight in singing. I loved it. I was brought up to love it. My mother sang to me as a matter of course. She sang to me in the bath or in bed or while I was getting dressed. (Constance and she used to share these jobs, for Constance was also a housemaid, with appropriate duties.) If I happened to be ill in bed, she would sing while I was convalescent. Here’s one of her songs.

  ‘Johnny used to grind the coffee mill

  And mix up the sugar with the sand.

  When the shop was shut, at the corner pub,

  Drinks all round he’d stand.

  He grinds a different mill just now

  And he’s breaking up a lot of stone:

  And all because the poor boy mixed up

  His master’s money with his own.’

  Here’s the air.

  She told me that when she was a nurse the medical students used to come round outside the wards with banjos and boaters (just like Uncle Ernest) and that that was one of their favourite songs.

  ‘Oh, and Sister used to get so cross! “Will you girls come away from that window and get on with your work?” and “Johnny used to grind the coffee mill” coming up from outside . . .’

  I wasn’t altogether clear what the song meant, but it was one I loved and used to ask for again and again.

  My mother sang traditional songs, too. (Not folk songs. Real folk songs have never been popular songs, of course. I quote from the Introduction to the Penguin Book of English Folk Songs: ‘An old Suffolk labourer with a fine folk song repertory and a delicate, rather gnat-like voice, once remarked: “I used to be reckoned a good singer before these here tunes came in.” The tunes he spoke of with such scorn had come in with a vengeance, and it seemed that his kind of songs, once so much admired, would be swept away by the flood of commercial popular music.’)

  I remember, once, being convalescent in bed and my mother coming back from the town in high feather. We had been talking of getting a book of songs, chiefly for the words, for my mother couldn’t read music: either she knew a tune or she didn’t. ‘Dicky, I’ve got a book, and it’s got “Clementine” and “John Peel” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” and all those!’ I think we started in right away. ‘Polly Wolly Doodle’, of course, was also a mystery to me. Later, I used to think it must be about a runaway slave. Now, I think it’s about a Confederate deserter in the Civil War.

  My mother used to tell me, too, about Violet Lorraine in The Bing Boys, and sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’. And of course there was ‘All the nice girls love a sailor’ and ‘Tipperary’ and many more.

  I think that if you want a child to grow up to love music, singing to it is important. The thing was, my mother enjoyed the singing as much as I did, and I was the only person she could do it with. Otherwise she would have been self-conscious. I don’t know why, but somehow my mother couldn’t have sung with my brother on the piano. She had to be unaccompanied and uncriticized.

  She read to me, too. Beatrix Potter, of course. And Pooh. This was the heyday of A. A. Milne - 1924 to 1928. Everyone read When We Were Very Young and Pooh: everyone quoted them. Everyone knew that Christopher Robin went down with Alice, and that he said his prayers. What do I think of it now? I think a lot of the light verse is pleasant for a child, but needs to be mixed up with better stuff. As for the stories, I think them too trivial, but they are redeemed by the marvellous characters. Characters are the essence of fiction. This is the limitation of folk tales, of course: marvellous stories and no characters. The prince is a prince and the dragon is a dragon like other dragons. ‘Pooh’ will survive on the characters all right, no danger. But Beatrix Potter will survive on story, style and characters. She reads much better than Pooh once you’re grown-up and, as C.S. Lewis said, ‘A book that’s not worth reading when you’re sixty is not worth reading when you’re six.’ I wouldn’t say Pooh is not worth reading, but I do think there’s a detectable condescension and self-conscious ‘cuteness’ about it.

  My mother also read me poetry. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, and ‘Young Lochinvar’ and ‘John Gilpin’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ and ‘Up the Airy Mountain’ and pretty well everything else that a child can take in. I used to shiver at ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, and indeed I’d think twice, myself, before letting it loose on a small child. The great virtue of Stevenson, as I see it now, is that it’s poetry for poetry’s sake - not poetry telling stories. You can start a child on pure poetry with Stevenson.

  As I got older, my father used to read to me, too. He wouldn’t have read Beatrix Potter - and certainly not Pooh - but he would read R.M. Ballantyne - The Coral Island, The Gorilla Hunters, etc. - and Treasure Island and Kidnapped; and even the ‘Dimsie’ stones of Dorita Fairlie Bruce. Above all, we read Dr Dolittle. The Dr Dolittle books were coming out new at this time, 1922 to 1932. (Hugh Lofting evidently wrote at great speed.) The shortcomings of the Dolittle books are easy enough for an adult to pin down. The animals, in their mentalities, are really just human beings in a way in which the animals in the Jungle Books are not (or not quite). For example, the White Mouse knows what grand opera is, and Too-Too the owl can do arithmetic. But Lofting wrote with warmth and humour, and a
gain, the characters are likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for animals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr Dolittle must answer for it.

  Here are some lines from a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen, remembering those early days.

  ‘I remember all my road, the tiny lanes

  Running between the honeysuckled hedges;

  The streams, and moorhens twining through the sedges;

  The snails upon the shining hornbeam leaves,

  And glow-worms in the evening grass.

  I remember how that Childhood used to pass;

  The great red moon, the scent of August phlox,

  Grasshoppers in the fields, the chiming clocks

  Scarce audible from the far town below;

  The yellow corn-sheaves and the sky above;

  All simple things, Memories that all men know,

  The earliest foundations of this love.’

  Chapter II

  In those days, Wash Common was still a village a good mile or more outside Newbury, up Wash Hill on the Andover Road. Its population would have been a few hundred, I suppose, and there was open country between it and Newbury. Newbury really began (conveniently for my father) at the hospital, a mile down the hill from our gate.

  The first battle of Newbury, at which Lord Falkland, a leading cavalier, was killed (some say suicidally), was fought on 22 September 1643 at Wash Common and on the lower land lying between Wash Common and Newbury. In my day this was something which every Wash Commoner knew and could talk about with at least a smattering of local topographical knowledge. (‘Ah, that’s where they put the guns, see?’)