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That evening the members of the Overseas Club entertained the staff at a fancy dress dance, a function at which I would, in retrospect, have dearly liked to have been present. Just as I would also have liked to have been present at Diaghilev’s productions of La Boutique Fantasque, The Three Cornered Hat and Midnight Sun at the Empire Theatre, with Karsavina, Tchernicheva, Massine and Svoboda; although as a future traveller I might have been expected to derive more benefit from attending Lowell Thomas’s With Allenby in Palestine and With Lawrence in Arabia, – ‘Two entertainments for the price of one’ – at the Albert Hall; or a showing of Tarzan of the Apes at the New Gallery; or attending a lecture on The Antarctic Expedition of 1914–17 by Sir Ernest Shackleton at the Hampstead Conservatoire.
That day, too, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Ship, Bogota, left the Thames on the top of the tide, bound for Valparaiso.
That afternoon the muffin man ringing his bell went down Riverview Gardens, the side road outside ‘Ther Mansions’ as the local tradesmen who dealt with my mother called them, in which there were other blocks of flats, carrying his muffins in a wooden tray covered with a green baize cloth, which he balanced on his head; and the lamplighter came and went on his bicycle (lighting-up time that evening was 4.21 p.m.), lancing the gas lamps in the street into flame with a long bamboo pole.
I did not know about any of these exciting things, and if I had I would not have cared. I had no intention of going anywhere, certainly not to Valparaiso in the SS Bogota. And so ended my birthday. For all concerned it had been a jolly long one.
1 All sums of sterling have been converted from pounds, shillings and pence to their decimal equivalents and to American currency of the time.
2 Up to this time employees at the Army and Navy Stores had worked a sixty-hour week, and men of sixty were being paid as little as £2–£2.25 ($7.80–$8.80) a week. In one department fifty women were employed whose average wage was less than £1.26 ($4.90) a week. The strikers who received much sympathetic support from the public and the newspapers were successful in improving their lot.
CHAPTER TWO The Baby as a Traveller
At the time I was born, and for long afterwards, ‘middle-middleclass babies’, of whom I was one, rarely travelled in motor cars, ‘middle-middle-class motors’ being mostly open ones, and sometimes difficult to close if a change of weather demanded it. When I went on holiday the year after I was born, and the year after that – and photographs assure me that I did – it was by train from Victoria, Waterloo, or Liverpool Street with lots of trunks and my vast £25 ($97.50) pram with its fringed awnings and a sort of shotgun holster for parasols or umbrellas, according to what was going on overhead, which needed a couple of porters to lift it into the guard’s van, which meant lots of lovely tipping. In those years I went to nice, unadventurous places such as Frinton, Bembridge, Broadstairs, or Cliftonville which was ideal for babies because there nature had been almost completely eradicated. I cannot remember the lot, for I spent a week here, a week there, presumably as the spirit moved me.
Down on the beach at one or other of these or similar resorts, surrounded by babies of similar age and condition (The Times recorded some nineteen babies as having been born on the same day I was), I used to pass the cooler days at some of them against a background of cliffs and the only recently outmoded, horse-drawn bathing machines which, horseless, rather like the electric brougham but without the electricity, still performed the function for which they had been built but were now parked permanently above high-water mark. If the temperature rose above 55° Fahrenheit, an admittedly rare occurrence at the seaside (which is also the correct temperature for serving draught beer in Britain), we would all insist on being taken indoors and placed in our bassinets, still swathed in voile, not as a protection against treacherous currents of air but, on the same principle as Bedouins swathe themselves in wraps, against the intense heat.
The truth is that babies do not like travel, and I was no exception. Babies are unadventurous. Babies act as grapnels to prevent ‘the family’ dragging its ground. That is why they were invented. Perversely, their desire for fresh horizons comes much later when they have already begun to ‘attract’ fares, and can no longer travel free; by which time they are no longer babies at all.
The prospect of the Great Glen, the Grand Canyon, the wastes of the Sahara at sunset, the entrancing, set-piece landscapes of Tuscany, all leave them equally indifferent, and usually breaking out in a rash which takes weeks to clear up. Useless to consult the baby about where it would be prepared to go without these alarming side effects because it will never express an opinion until it arrives at its destination, when it is invariably adverse.
Thus did I spend my first two years of travel. It is a wonder, and a credit to my parents’ resilience, that I did not succeed in driving them permanently round the bend.
What can one truly remember of one’s infant life when one comes to write about it years later, putting as it were one’s hand on one’s heart, separating in the mind’s eye what one can really remember from what one has been told, separating fact from fiction, or what is more factual from what is more fictional on those frontiers where these nuances become blurred and indistinct?
In the case of my own childhood this mélange of what I could really remember and what I thought I could remember was the result of looking over a long period of years at hundreds of photographs made with a 3A Eastman Kodak. Some of them were taken in what even today would be regarded as technically difficult circumstances, such as foreground figures photographed against shimmering summer seas, long before exposure meters came into use. In many of them I was either the principal figure or, if it was a landscape, was somehow or other included as an extra.
Thus I appear, embalmed as it were, in volume after volume of now fragile cloth- and morocco-bound albums, most of them with the relevant dates and places written neatly above them in ink: in the pram at Frinton, Whitsun 1920; on the sands below the white cliffs at Broadstairs, facing the English Channel, in front of a striped bathing tent with my father’s white buckskin shoes parked outside it – he may have gone for a dip – ensconced on a cushion on a deck-chair like an infant Dalai Lama, August 1920; barely able to stand, supported by my mother like a drunken man, wearing a white woolly suit and defiantly waving a rattle, behind the privet hedge in the front garden of Three, Ther Mansions, on a bleak day in March 1921; apparently alone at Bembridge, Isle of Wight, apart from a girl in a gym smock who is ‘bothering me’, September 1921; wearing a floppy white sun hat and rubber waders, digging away on the beach at Bournemouth with a wooden spade and, without the waders, riding on a donkey outside a subscription library on the front, Whitsun 1922; on the Isle of Wight again, this time in the side-car of a motor-cycle combination with my mother at the helm; on the rocks and in the bracken on Sark, July 1923.
How few other holiday-makers there were on the beaches, even in high summer in these years immediately after the war, is shown in those early photographs. At that time only the well-off went to the sea for a fortnight or a month. The great majority, that is of those who went away at all, went on day excursions as ‘trippers’.
According to these photographs everywhere we went we must have picnicked. In every picture of a picnic a large wicker basket that would have needed two people to carry it, loaded with mounds of food, and batteries of Thermos flasks in their own special wicker containers, stand between us and whoever is taking the photograph.
One of these picnic photographs, taken in September 1921, shows my mother and I in a lane in Surrey, not far from the London to Portsmouth Road. It is a sunless, autumnal day, mist is beginning to rise from the fields beyond the hedgerow gate where our picnic has been set out, and by the roadside stands our splendid, shiny, open Napier motor car, the sort of motor car which Mr Toad would have planned to make off with if he had ever set eyes on it.
Although I remember the Isle of Wight as the place where I first sat in the side-car of a motor cycle, at Easter 1923, much more I remember it as being the Place Where God Lived, although this was later, some time in the summer or autumn of 1925. It must have been during one of those interpolated holidays my mother was so adept at arranging at an instant’s notice if my father had to go abroad without her, on the grounds that a change of air would do me good. He often used to go to Holland to sell enormous coats and costumes to the Dutch. With her she took her sister, my Auntie May, who loved travel, however banal.
On one occasion we made an excursion to a place near the middle of the island and some time in the afternoon of what I remember as a very hot day we arrived at our destination, a village of thatched houses that were clustered about the foot of a green hill, on the summit of which stood what seemed a very small church.1 From where we stood it was silhouetted against the now declining sun, the rays of which shone through its windows, producing an unearthly effect.
There was no time to climb the hill to the church and have tea as well. If there had been, I am sure that my mother and my aunt, both of whom were interested in ‘old things’, would have done so. Instead, we had the tea, in the garden of one of the cottages, and while we were having it I heard my mother and my aunt talking about the place and how nice it was, which they called Godshill.
I was very excited. Godshill. If this was Godshill then God must live on it. God to me at this time and for long years to come was a very old, but very fit, version of Jesus and much less meek-looking. He had a long white beard, was dressed in a white sheet and was all shiny, as if he was on fire. He also had a seat in the front row of the dress circle, as it were, so that he could see immediately if one was doing wrong. This was the God to whom I prayed each night, either with my mother’s help or with whoever was looking after me.
‘Does he live on it?’ I asked my mother.
‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘that’s where he lives, darling, on top of the hill.’
I was filled with an immense feeling of happiness that this radiant being, whom I had never actually seen but who was always either just around the corner or else hovering directly overhead but always invisible, should live in such a shining, beautiful place; and I asked if we could climb the hill and see him. Unfortunately, the train was due and we had to hurry to the station. I cried all the way to it and most of the way back to Bembridge. I never went back to Godshill and I never will.
I can remember, in July 1923, being carried high on my father’s head through the bracken in the combes that led down to the beaches on Sark, and once having reached them I can remember falling down constantly on the rocks and hurting myself, I considered, badly. And it was on Sark that I had my first remembered nightmare, in the annexe to Stock’s Hotel, a charming, ivy-clad, farmlike building. I awoke screaming in what was still broad daylight with the sun shining outside my first-floor room in which the blinds were drawn, to think myself abandoned to a dreadful fate by my parents who were dining only a few feet away in the hotel, certain that I had ‘gone off’ to sleep. It was a nightmare of peculiar horror, because it was founded on fact; so horrible and at the same time so difficult to explain to anyone that for years I dared not confide the details to anyone, and to my parents I never did, although it recurred throughout my childhood, together with an almost equally awful one about falling down an endless shaft.
1 It was originally intended that the church should be built at the foot of the hill near the site of the present village. However, when work was begun on it, the plan was vetoed by a band of local fairies. As a practical expression of their objection whenever the walls reached a particular height they proceeded to knock them down and carry the stones up to the top of the hill where they rebuilt the walls, after which they danced round them in a ring. After this had happened three times, the workmen who had on each occasion been forced to demolish the walls, carry the stones back down the hill and then build them up again in the low ground, lost heart and decided to build the church where the fairies wanted it to be built. As a result of this wise decision there was much jubilation among the fairies and when the church was finally completed they held a great fête on top of the hill to celebrate their victory, the sounds of their revelry being audible at a considerable distance.
CHAPTER THREE Rings Around the Tombs in SW13
(1923)
This hideous dream I last dreamt, after an interval of fifteen years, while escaping from the Germans in Italy in the autumn of 1943. It derived from an incident that occurred in the spring or early summer of 1923, the same year that we went to Sark. This incident took place in Barnes while I was on an outing with my nurse in what used to be called a mail cart or Victoria carriage. A mail cart was a machine made for the conveyance of children who have outgrown their prams, as I had, but were still unable to cover long distances on foot, bearing the same relation to a push chair as a Hispano-Suiza to an Austin Seven. In it the infant occupant sat upright with his back as it were to the engine, in this case whoever was pushing the thing. With the hood up conversation between pusher and pushed was precluded, unless the pusher stopped pushing and walked round to the front of the vehicle. It was in some ways a beautiful vehicle, the product of the pre-industrial revolution coach-builder’s imagination and just as an electric brougham looked like a brougham that had lost its horse, so a mail cart looked like a Regency curricle which had lost its horses and was being pushed back to the stables by human hands.
My pusher was called Lily. She was my first and last real nurse. I can remember everything about Lily without the aid of photographs; but the photographs confirm that she was what I thought she was, even at that early age, a very good-looking in a soppy kind of way, raven-haired, distinctly friendly girl with dark rings round her black eyes. I have already referred to her in another book, Love and War in the Apennines, but she has to be resurrected yet again for the purpose of this narrative.
Lily had been kitted out by my mother in what must have been a moment of social aspiration in full nurse’s rig. The winter outfit, navy-blue coat and a sort of pork-pie hat to match which she wore at a jaunty angle, was innocuous enough but the summer one was very different. It consisted of a short-sleeved blue-denim dress with starched white collar and cuffs, black silk stockings, high heels and a headdress made up of swathes of dark-blue veiling. Dressed in this outfit, a model girl’s idea of a W1 or SW1 nurse, with the veiling and the black-rimmed eyes, she looked like a mixture of a houri and nurse in a blue film. In London, W1, or SW1, where nurses, in fact, tended to be rather plain, if not hideous or of forbidding demeanour, she would have been very conspicuous and they would probably have driven her from Hyde Park, if she had attempted to enter it, into that desert where nurses whose charges did not appear in Debrett were sent to languish, Kensington Gardens. In Barnes, SW13, the total effect of the uniform, Lily and her soppy, friendly air could have been nothing less than inflammatory. I loved Lily but even then at that tender age I recognized that it was in a different way from anyone else who ever looked after me; and I think Lily loved me, but in a different way from the way in which I loved her. Thus, because of all this, in her company, as a sort of accomplice or accessory after the fact, because I could easily have told my mother what was going on, I found myself being trundled to assignations, only one or two of which I can remember fully, with what I recall as old men (which meant that they might have been twenty years old) and my mother recalled years later when I was fully grown as ‘dirty old men’ (which probably meant that they were over forty).
The venues for these presumed encounters, for I never remember seeing any actual goings-on, were the towing path above Hammersmith Bridge near Chiswick Ferry which was grassy and on which a number of bushes grew, and a creepy and now desecrated and presumably deconsecrated cemetery on Barnes Common. In it Lily kept me quiet while, again presumably she made rings around the tombs, by giving me handfuls of Carrara marble and other more brightly coloured chippings to play with. Some of these tomb chippings found their way into my bath where they were discovered by my mother. Subsequent sleuthing led to Lily being surprised by my mother, whether while being about to ‘do it’, or while actually in the act of ‘doing it’, or simply being chatted up, whether on the towing path or in the cemetery or at some other trysting place, she never made clear. Whatever or wherever it was, Lily was instantly dismissed, although this was not until some time towards the end of 1924, the year following the events which I am now narrating.
Whether it was in pursuit of whatever she was in pursuit of, or we were simply on a new, adventurous walk, on the afternoon on which the happenings which led up to my nightmare took place, Lily pushed me in the mail cart up the towing path from Hammersmith Bridge as far as Chiswick Ferry. The ferry was for foot passengers only, and when it functioned at all, which was rarely, they were conveyed across the river by a ferryman in a rowing-boat. Having reached the ferry, as she usually did, Lily turned left down a narrow, unmetalled lane between two reservoirs from which it was separated by iron railings. This lane led to Lonsdale Road, the road up which the police used to push the drunk and disorderly on their handcart to Barnes Police Station. At Lonsdale Road she normally turned left for Hammersmith Bridge and home along the pavements. But on this particular day instead of doing this she crossed Lonsdale Road and continued to follow the alignment of the lane into what was, for me, unknown territory.
It was an eerie place. To the left of the lane, which was also unmetalled, a rather dreary expanse of fields with a farmhouse on the edge of it, what must have been one of the nearest farms to central London, stretched away towards the semi-detached developments that but for the war would have already engulfed them, as they would shortly. In these flat fields, some distance off, a line of what looked like men but I later discovered when I was older were rough-looking women wearing cloth caps and sacks in lieu of aprons, worked away, bent double among the vegetables.
To the right of the road a rusty corrugated-iron fence, its top cut into cruel, jagged spikes and festooned with brambles and old man’s beard (an appropriate weed for Lily, perhaps, in the circumstances), separated it from the adjoining property, and along it a line of trees, possibly willows, with thick pollarded trunks grew, or rather rotted, for most of them were in the last stages of decay. The surface of the road was full of potholes with water in them, and in the ditches on either side was some of the detritus of civilization, what the French more expressively call ordures – broken lavatory pans, rusty oil drums, bits of bicycles and prams, broken shoes, awful items of discarded clothing, bundles of sodden newspaper, broken glass. It was certainly no place for a nanny and a small child in a mail cart. Some five years later, when I was at Colet Court (a London preparatory school), my favourite museum was the Imperial War Museum in South Kensington and there in the picture gallery I saw dozens of similar roads, only the potholes in the pictures were shell-holes and the trees had been shattered by gunfire, all painted by war artists on Flanders and other fields. It was therefore not surprising that when the fields were finally built over some years later and the lane became a respectable suburban road, whoever was in charge of naming roads in Barnes gave it the name it bears today, Verdun Road.
Against the largest and most decayed of these ruined trees a fire was burning, eating its way into the heart of it, and sitting close to the fire, although it was late afternoon it was still warm, were three of the hideous hags who, when the tide was right, slept up against the abutments under Hammersmith Bridge. And on the fire was an iron pot. It would have been impossible for anyone to say how old these creatures were. They were so blackened by smoke and smeared with filth that it was difficult to identify them as human beings. One of them was singing in a wild, tuneless mindless way and another was screeching at the third member of this ghastly triumvirate, while picking away like a monkey in her long, lank hair. The third one was tending the pot.
As we came abreast of them, the one who was looking for lice or nits in her companion’s hair (for that is what she must have been doing), got to her feet and came towards us with surprising swiftness, with her horrible discoloured stockings dragging around her ankles, mumbling something about ‘the baby’ between her broken teeth. It was too much for me and I began to bellow; and it was too much for Lily who kicked up her heels and fled, pushing the mail cart through the water-filled potholes which she had previously carefully skirted, so that it bounced up and down on its springs, soaking herself in the process.
She did not stop until she reached the corner of Madrid Road where we were once again on a real, made-up road and enclosed by comforting suburbia. By this time she had more or less succeeded in calming me down.
‘Horrible old thing,’ she said, ‘I thought she wanted to eat you up.’
And this not only set me off again but crystallized the dream so that it would always unfold in the same way: myself alone, forced by some irresistible power to walk along the lane with the sun sinking behind the corrugated-iron fence and the dying trees to the one where three cackling hags sit round a fire burning in the heart of it, preparing to make a cannibal feast of the infant Newby.
It was about this time that the tragic demise took place of Mrs George. Mrs George had been our cook/housekeeper since before I was born and it was to her that my mother used to pass on her copy of the Daily Mirror when she had done with it. When I was born she ceased to ‘live in’, arriving each morning before eight o’clock from where she lived, over the river in Hammersmith.
When she retired, early in 1923, she went to live in a house, so far as I can make out, in Glentham Road and continued to visit us. Glentham Road led down by what must have been one of the few hills in Barnes from Castelnau by the side of the reservoir from which the spray used to blow across the road. Mrs George was white-haired, fresh-complexioned, large enough to qualify for one of the smaller sort of coat that my father sold to the Dutch, and motherly. Seen from the front, protected by an expanse of spotless, white starched apron she looked like a spinnaker that was drawing nicely. I loved Mrs George. She smelt lovely, of the things she was always baking and she let me help her to stir the Christmas pudding mixture which was delicious in its raw state but emerged from the oven in the form of puddings as heavy and black as cannon balls.
Mrs George called my mother ‘Ther Missus’ and my father ‘Ther Master’. She called the enormous ochreous, to me rather creepy building at the bottom of Riverview Gardens with the words HARRODS FURNITURE DEPOSITORY written large on the side of it, ‘Ther Suppository’.
Each week on her afternoon off Mrs George used to set off with her friend, another cook from round the corner, for Pontings store in Kensington High Street, always a magnet for domestics on their afternoons off, travelling on the No. 9 or 73 bus. With her, rain or shine, summer and winter, she always carried an umbrella and often, even when it was not raining, she used to be seen in the street with it up. This was her only eccentricity and no one will ever know why Mrs George took it into her head one day when the tide at Hammersmith Bridge was sufficiently low for her to go down some steps to the muddy foreshore and, fully clothed and with her umbrella up, although it was not raining, enter the water and be swept away by the still ebbing tide. It was not for lack of money. She was of a prudent nature. The coroner recorded a verdict of ‘suicide while of unsound mind’ which was more or less mandatory at that time.
‘George gone,’ I said when the news was eventually broken to me.
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