The Pritchett Century (8 page)

It was on one of these stays in York that my grandfather took me along the walls to the Minster and showed me the Lincoln green glass. I had already had many pernickety tours with Uncle Arthur, who pointed out bits of joinery and stone masonry, and explained every historical detail. He was a connoisseur of carving and especially of tombs. His was a craftsman’s attitude. It was a sight to see him standing, bandy, threatening and bearded in the aisle, with bicycle clips on his trousers—for he rarely took them off—and looking up to the vault of the aisles with an appraising eye. He often had a ruler sticking out of his jacket pocket and on my first visit I really thought he was going to pull it out and start measuring up. He didn’t go so far as to say he could have built the place himself, but once we got to the choir stalls and started on the hinges and dove-tailing, he looked dangerously near getting to work on them. The choir stalls appealed to him because there are often pot-bellied and impish bits of lewd carving under a seat or on the curl of an arm, and he always gave me a pagan wink or nudge when he found one. Once he said “That’d vex t’minister.” Uncle Arthur behaved as if he owned the place and would get into arguments with vergers and even bewilder a clergyman by a technical question.

My grandfather’s attitude was different. The grandeur, height and spaciousness of the place moved him. He was enraptured by it. But, pointing down at the choir, he said that it was sad to know that this lovely place was in the possession of the rich and ungodly and a witness not to the Truth but to a corrupt and irrelevant theology.

The Minster was scarcely the house of God any more but the house of a class.

“And you cannot,” he said severely, “worship God freely here. You have to pay for your pews.” The clergy, he said, were like the Pharisees in the Bible.

We left the cathedral and went up to the steps to the walls once
more at the point where the railway runs under an arch into the old York station where Stephenson’s Rocket stands; and we sat in one of the niches of the battlements and looked down on the shunting trains, the express to Edinburgh coming in, the Flying Scotsman moving out to London, under their boiling white smoke. And there he told me about the wrongs of England and of a great man like Carlyle and of another, John Ruskin, who had hated the railways.

“Great men,” he said. “God-fearing men.”

The granite walls, the overpowering weight of English history seemed to weigh on us. To choose to be a great man was necessary; but to be one one must take on an enormous burden of labour and goodness. He seemed to convey that I would be a poor thing if I didn’t set to work at once, and although the idea appealed to me, the labour of becoming one was too much. I wasn’t born for it. How could I get out of it? In the south fortunately we were feebler and did not have to take on these tasks. I loved the north but I was nervous of its frown; and even of the kindly laughter I heard there.

After York we used to take the train to see the remaining sister of my grandmother, the third heiress. She lived upon the edge of the moors above Kirbymoorside where my grandmother came from, in a hamlet called Appleton. This was wild and lonely country. You drove up five or six miles in the carrier’s gig; if it was raining, the passengers all sat under one enormous umbrella. There was a long climb to the common, with the horse snorting and puffing, and then you were in the wide single street of the hamlet, with wide grass verges on either side and you were escorted in by platoons of the fine Appleton geese. You passed the half-dozen pumps where girls were getting water for the cottages and arrived at a low flint cottage where my Great Aunt Lax lived.

The frown went off Grandfather’s face when he left his York relations. His preaching was over. He was free. He was back in his wife’s country. Aunt Lax had a farm and land that she now let off. The industrial revolution, the grim days of Hull and Nottingham and Bradford were forgotten, we were in true country and had gone back a century and Granda forgot his respectability and took off his clerical collar.

At first sight Aunt Lax looked hard. She was a tallish and skinny woman with iron-grey hair which she kept in curlers all the week except Sundays. She had a long thin nose, a startling pair of black eyebrows like charcoal marks, wore steel spectacles and was moustached and bearded like a man. Not only that, like a man, she was always heaving things about—great pails of milk in her dairy—churning butter, clattering about on clogs, shouting across the street; and her skirts were half the time kirtled to her knees. Her arms were long and strong and bony. On a second look you saw that her lizard-like face had been beautiful; it was of a dark Scandinavian beauty. But the amusing thing about this spinsterish creature—and perhaps it was what made her so gay and tolerant—was that she had been married three times. The rumour was that there had been a fourth. These marriages were a shock to the family, but Lax in name, Lax in nature, this indefatigable Wesleyan did well out of her weddings and funerals and had a long stocking.

When I was six I met the last Mr Lax. He was a dumb giant who sat on a chair outside the cottage in the sun. He was very old and had a frightening glass eye. Since there were many ploughs, carts and traps and gigs in her farmyard, I came to think he was a moorland farmer, but this was not so. A few years ago, sitting in a pub at Lastingham near by, I found an old shepherd who had known him well.

“Nay, he was nobbut t’old watchman up at t’lead mine,” he told me. If Aunt Lax had done well out of her two previous husbands, the third was obviously a folly. And a strange one. The chimney of the lead mine—now abandoned—stands up like a gaunt warning finger in the middle of the heather that rolls away from Lastingham, and when she was a girl she was locked in the house, as all the village girls were, when the miners came down on Saturday nights to the village pub. North-country love is very sudden. There it was: a miner got her in the end.

Year after year I went to Appleton, sometimes alone, sometimes with Cyril, the brother who was a year or so younger than I. Aunt Lax had no children of her own so that there was nothing possessive or spoiling in her affections. We hauled water for her at the pump and, for the rest, she let us run wild with the jolly daughters of the blacksmith
and anyone we came across. We scarcely ever went to chapel. The smell of bacon woke us in the morning and we went down from our pretty room which contained a chest of drawers made by Uncle Arthur, to the large kitchen where the pots hung on the chains over the fire and where she sometimes cooked on a spit. Her baking days were less fanatical than my grandma’s and her washing days were pleasanter. Even the suds smelt better and there were always the big girls to chase round with us when the washing was brought in from the line or the hedges when the day was over.

When her third husband died, it was thought that amorous or calculating Great Aunt Lax would take a fourth. She had picked her second and third at the funeral feasts at which dozens of local farmers could form a sound opinion of her as a caterer and housekeeper. They had a good look round at her stables when they came, knew her acres and her fame as the leading Wesleyan for miles around. Instead, she took in a female friend, a Miss Smith. She, too, died and on the very day my brother and I arrived at the cottage. We arrived in a storm and were taken at once to one of the outer sculleries where a village girl came in, stripped us, scrubbed off the London dirt and swore to us she’d let us see the body upstairs. We longed to see it, but the girl took us off to the blacksmith’s where we had to stay. More promises were made but we never saw the body. But we were allowed to play in a barn and watch the country people coming to the funeral feast. We avenged ourselves by opening six or seven bales of rag strips which Aunt Lax used for her winter occupation: making rag hearth-rugs. We threw them all over her orchard.

She was not very vexed. There was a lot of questioning of us afterwards in York and in London about who had come to the funeral, for Aunt Lax was supposed to have added to her wealth by Miss Smith’s death, and everyone was trying to guess if there would be a fourth or whether other relations were on the prowl. She grew to be rather witch-like.

The moorland life was eventless. Every so often Aunt Lax would dress up in a heavy grey tweed costume, put on her hat and go off to Kirbymoorside Market, sitting by the carrier. It was a state visit. She would go there to buy cloth, or stones of flour and other things for her
bins, and to see her lawyer. Once a week a pedlar would come round or a man selling herrings from Whitby and she gossiped with them. She understood boys. She told us of all the local crimes and knew the sites of one or two murders. She sent us down to the mill because a man had murdered his wife there years before. One year when I was nine I came up from London terrified with street tales about Jack the Ripper and I tried to get her to tell me he did not exist or had at any rate died long ago.

“Nay,” she said. “He’s still alive. He’s been up here. I saw him myself at ‘Utton-le-’Ole last market day.” (None of our Sawdons had “an aitch to their names.”)

This cured me of my terror of the Ripper: the fears of childhood are solitary and are lasting in the solitariness of cities. But in villages everyone knows everything that goes on, all the horrors real or imaginary; people come back from prison and settle down comfortably again; known rapists drink their beer in the public house in the evenings; everyone knows the thieves. The knowledge melts peacefully into the general novel of village life.

But one alarming thing occurred when I was five or six, in Appleton. It had the Haworth touch and it showed the dour, dangerous testing humour of the moorland people. We all set out one afternoon in a gig, my grandparents, Aunt Lax and myself, to a farm, a lonely stone place with geese, ducks and chickens fluttering in the yard. A few dark-leafed trees bent by the gales were standing close to it. We had tea in the low ceilinged kitchen and the farmer noticed that I was gazing at a gun which hung over the mantelpiece.

“T’lad is looking at yon gun of yours, Feyther,” said his wife.

“Ay,” said the farmer. “Dost know what this is lad?”

“A gun. It shoots.”

“Ay. And what does it shoot?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would ’ee like to see it?”

“Eeh. He’d be fair capped to touch it,” said my grandmother. The farmer got the gun down and let me touch it, then (helping me, for it was heavy), he let me hold it.

“Dost know how it works?”

I murmured.

The farmer broke the gun, showed me where the cartridges went, closed it, clicked the safety catch and the trigger. He gave it to me again and allowed me to do this. I was amazed.

“Would ’ee like to see the cartridges?”

“Yes.”

“Yes please,” said my grandmother.

“Please,” I said.

He got a couple of cartridges from a drawer and loaded the gun.

“There you are. It can shoot now. Hold it.”

“Ready! Present! Fire!” said my grandfather. “You can shoot a rabbit now.”

The farmer steadied the gun which swayed in my small hands.

“Ay,” said the farmer. “Take offt’ safety catch. Now if you pull t’ trigger now it’ll fire.”

I trembled.

“Would it kill rabbits?” I asked.

“Ay,” laughed the farmer. “And people. Come, Mother, come Grandma and Mrs Lax, stand over against the wall, t’lad wants to shoot you.”

“No,” I said.

“Ay he does,” said the excited farmer, waving them to the dresser and there they stood laughing and the gun swung in my aching hand.

“Eeh t’little lad wouldn’t shoot his grandma as makes him those custard pies,” Grandma said.

“Safety catch off. Now if you pull t’ trigger—has ’e got his finger on it?—they’ll all be dead.”

“No,” I said with tears in my eyes and nearly dropped the gun. The farmer caught it.

“Eeh well, it’s a lesson,” said the farmer hanging the gun back on the wall.

“Old Tom likes a joke,” they said, going home, but Aunt Lax said the kitchen was small and that was the way Mr Robinson shot his wife down ’t Mill, no accident that was. But all the way my grandma moaned:

“Eeh, who would have thought our Victor would want to shoot his grandma. Eeh. Eeh, well.”

I sulked with misery and, after a couple of miles, she said to me:
“He’s got a monkey on his back,” a sentence that always roused my temper for I felt at my back for the monkey and screamed “I haven’t. I haven’t.”

That was the night I told my grandfather again I hoped he’d be knocked down by a train at the Junction when he crossed the line and I got my second spanking.

I came home from these Yorkshire visits sadly to whatever London house we were living in and would see in my mind’s eye the white road going across the moors, like a path across a swollen sea, grey in most seasons but purple in the summer, rising and disappearing, a road that I longed to walk on, mile after mile. I was never to see one that moved me so strangely until, in my twenties, I saw another such in Castile. It brought back my childhood and this was the cause of my walking across Spain. So, when one falls in love with a face, the reason may be that one saw such a face, perhaps of an old woman, that excited one in childhood. I always give a second look at any woman with Aunt Lax’s eyebrows and her lizard-like face.

Why the leather trade? Father had met a man who belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and who had said he knew a firm of Leather Factors that had an opening for an office boy. Begin (he said) at the bottom of the ladder, like Henry Ford. I shall not forget that spiritless January morning when Father took me to a place in the Bermondsey district of London. The one pleasant but intimidating thing was that for the first time I sat with Father in a corner seat of a First Class compartment of the train on the old South Eastern and Chatham railway. I was wearing a new suit, a stiff collar that choked me, a bowler hat which bit hard into my forehead and kept slipping over my ears. I felt sick. There were two or three city gentlemen in the compartment, smoking pipes; my father presented me with a copy of the
Christian Science Sentinel
and told me to read it while he closed his eyes and prayed for me. I disliked being seen with this paper. He prayed as far as Hither Green—I opened my eyes for a glance at a house which had
been torn in half by a bomb in the autumn raids—and then he leaned across to me and, not as quietly as I would have liked, for the city gentlemen were staring at us, he reminded me of the story of the infant Samuel. Father was becoming emotional. To me the situation was once more like the sacrifice of Isaac.