A Traveller’s Life

Armed with a cap pistol for self-defence, holding Kathy’s hand, something I would not have done in broad daylight in case some other boys from Colet Court saw me and pulled my leg about it, both of us wearing woollen mufflers over our mouths that – until they were washed – reeked of sulphurous soot, looking like a couple of robbers, we groped our way over the bridge and into Hammersmith in what had become overnight a void in which one could see nothing, except where here and there a gas lamp in the street produced a sickly yellow incandescence. In it we could hear the coughs and footsteps of other passers-by without seeing them until they were actually on top of us, the groaning of vehicles in low gear and the hoarse cries of men on foot armed with acetylene lamps who were trying to guide them through the murk. Eventually we arrived at school half an hour late, to find that those boys who had succeeded in getting there had already been sent home and, to my delight, repeated the whole adventurous process the other way round.

These narrow streets through which we made our way, now long since destroyed by wartime bombing or knocked down to make room for housing estates and flyovers, were where the poor lived. They even had the sort of names that, when I was older, I learned to recognize were reserved for the streets of the poor; because whoever was responsible for naming them, such as the official who named Fanny Road in Barnes, knew that it did not matter what sort of names they were given as the poor would never object to living in, for example, Distillery Lane W6.

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavour.

At one of these street corners there was a pub, taller or made to appear taller than the houses by a large sign with the name of the pub and the sorts of beer it sold inscribed on it in gold lettering, and curved to wrap around the angle of the building. In the morning, when we passed, it smelled of stale beer and sometimes the brewers’ draymen could be seen, enormously potbellied, purple-faced men, wearing leather aprons, lowering barrels with a rope down a shiny wooden chute from the horse-drawn drays, or else, having completed the delivery, drinking the first pints of the day they were entitled to as ‘perks’. (Some of these men drank as many as sixteen pints a day ‘regler’, according to a Watney’s drayman I met in the 1950s.)

And there were shops as minute as the houses – smaller, in fact, in terms of living space because they were houses in which what had been the front parlour had become the shop. They sold things that I was not usually allowed on the grounds that they would be bad for my teeth or my immortal soul, such as what my parents considered to be ‘vulgar’ comics; more vulgar, but not in the sense of being ‘rude’, than the Magnet and the Gem, both of which I was allowed and both of which Kathy enjoyed reading to me as much as I enjoyed listening, much more vulgar than the Children’s Newspaper, which because of its virtuous nature I already found boring. It was a useless prohibition anyway, as I could always borrow one of these more vulgar comics – ‘I say, man, if you let me have a go of your comic you can have a go of my liquorice strip’ – from other less watched-over boys at school.

Bad for the teeth were: lemonade made with lemonade crystals, much more delicious in my opinion than real lemonade; toffee sticky enough to pull out entire rows of stoppings; gobstoppers, huge sweets like musket balls that changed colour and the colour of your tongue progressively as you sucked them; sherbet imbibed through liquorice tubes from cylindrical yellow packets that looked like fireworks (oddly enough I was allowed liquorice); toffee apples that always had a thin layer of dust on them that had blown into the shop from the street outside.

Embedded in the pavements at some of the street corners there were cast-iron bollards, shaped like muzzle-loading cannon with imitation cannon balls stuck in their imitation muzzles, against which old men could usually be seen leaning, wearing cloth caps, white silk mufflers or red-spotted neckerchiefs and suits of what even to me seemed antique cut.

In 1927 the poor looked much poorer than they do today, in Hammersmith or in any other part of London. Their everyday clothes in those days, before sponging and pressing and dry-cleaning became commonplace, looked as if they had been slept in. For working men, manual labourers who lived by the sweat of their brows, there was no such thing as winter or summer clothes. A working man wore the same suit all the year round, except on Sundays. In summer, if it was really hot, he might discard his jacket, hardly ever his waistcoat, even though the cloth from which such a suit was made was often thicker and heavier than that used to make a present-day overcoat.

Because of this the poor often smelt. It was not a term of derision as it usually was at Colet Court. ‘Yah, you smell!’ Although some boys there did smell. It was a fact. One only had to travel, as I sometimes did to my great delight, on one of the tall, two-storeyed tramcars that used to sway down King Street from Hammersmith Broadway with bells clanging, like sailing ships rolling down to Rio, on my way to visit my Auntie May at Stamford Brook, or else travelling down Shepherd’s Bush Road en route with Ellen to visit an uncle of hers who had a boot repairing business in Goldhawk Road, to know this smell for yourself, a bitter-sweet odour that a modern traveller, Laurens Van Der Post, identified some thirty-five years later (in connection with the Russian proletariat, en masse) as the smell of soiled clothing, left and forgotten in a laundry basket. A bath was a tub half-filled with water from the copper in which the weekly wash was done. A wash was a lick and a promise in the kitchen sink.

I took more notice of the children of the poor than of the grown-ups, because they were nearer my level in the world in terms of feet and inches, and therefore more often confronted me. I remember the boys more than I remember the girls because the boys tended to move about in gangs. I remember them, not all of course, but many, as being pale and thin, some of them almost transparent, so that looking at their faces with the skin drawn tight over them and their cropped, sometimes shaven heads above, I had the impression of being able to see their skulls through the skin.

But, although some were painfully thin, with bulgy, raw-looking knees protruding below the ungainly-looking shorts they wore, cut down from the discarded trousers of their elder brothers, they were tough, as tough as those of their fathers who had survived the war. Among themselves they fought like ferrets, on the pavements, in the gutters, anywhere, not caring what damage they did to one another or their already tattered clothes, putting in the boot, as it is now called, when they were able, employing methods that at Colet Court were regarded as unfair, except by the gangs of bullies whose techniques surpassed anything the poor could think up at that time in terms of the infliction of physical pain. Their parents fought, too. Their fights were not the lightning affairs their children were adept in, as if they were torpedo-boats racing in to an enemy anchorage and doing the greatest amount of damage in the least possible time and then getting out again. They were lumbering, major actions between what were more like dreadnoughts, that went on until one or other of the participants was rendered hors de combat, or until the police arrived. Such encounters in the streets of Hammersmith were awful to watch, at least to me, because the idea of grown-ups of whatever condition, who were presumed to know better, actually fighting one another, pulling great tufts of one another’s hair out sometimes if they were women, was unthinkable.

The children of the poor, boys and girls alike, were resourceful. They had to be. Apart from marbles and iron hoops they had scarcely any bought toys; or if they had they must have kept them indoors as I never saw any. They tied lengths of ragged rope to the crossbars of the street lamps and swung on them, or else used them for skipping. In the autumn the boys played conkers, as we did at Colet Court, bashing away at one another’s iron-hard, specially cured horse chestnuts on a string until one or other of them broke. They also played various street and pavement games, such as hopscotch, according to the season of the year, marking out the courts with chalk. If I and my friends used to chalk out the same games on the pavements in Riverview Gardens, residents complained and we got ticked off by the porters, who were numerous. What I envied them were the scooters and little carts, made for them by their fathers or elder brothers, using wood from old packing cases and wheels from discarded roller skates. These scooters made what to me was a wonderfully deafening noise as their owners scooted along the pavements or, more daringly, along the road. I thought them far superior to my own bought scooter from Hamleys which, although possibly a little faster, was depressingly noiseless, being fitted with rubber wheels. In the little carts, which were almost equally noisy, they used to pull their younger brothers and sisters, most of whom should have been in prams if they had had prams, all the way from Hammersmith up Castlenore to Barnes Common and back, a couple of miles each way. How these infants survived such jolting journeys is a mystery.

They were brave, too. In summer, when it was high tide at Hammersmith, some of the boys who could not have been more than nine or ten, used to dive into the then indescribably filthy water from the parapet of the bridge, a good fifteen feet above it, and then, never having been taught to swim properly, dog-paddle to the embankment. They used to do this until a policeman, or a policewoman wearing a helmet like an upturned basin, a huge blue serge skirt and big black boots, used to appear and chase them into Hammersmith, still naked, clutching their ragged clothes, but never catching them.

Besides being tough, resourceful and brave they were also, so far as I was concerned, and anyone who travelled the same route to school as I did, extremely nasty. In the summer of 1928, for the first time I was allowed to go to school without Kathy, providing that I travelled by the back street route, avoiding Hammersmith Broadway, in which my parents were always convinced that I would be run over. Sometimes, but not always, I travelled with another boy who lived nearby us, whose parents bound him to the same conditions.

To us, the perils of this back street route were far more real than any of the risks our parents imagined us running in Hammersmith Broadway, such as being knocked down by a bus or tram. It took us through the heart of territory in which the poor and underprivileged lay in wait while on what appeared to be their more leisurely way to their own schools. Travelling with Kathy, herself a member of the working class, I now realized was like having been provided with some sort of laisser passer. In any event, she stood no nonsense from anyone and on the only occasion she did have trouble, when what seemed to me a very large boy, one as tall as she was, crept up behind her and pulled her long hair, she gave him such a resounding slap in the face that he went off howling. Now, using the same route, we encountered the enemy, an enemy waiting to jeer at us, shove us about, smash our straw hats in or pinch our caps, according to the time of year.

If there were only a couple, and they were not too large, we used to stand and fight. We were quite good at fighting, in fact, for much of the time we did little else in the breaks at Colet Court, and quite often we succeeded in sending them away blubbing. Surprisingly, for all their ferocity, they seemed less able than we were to put up with physical pain.

If we did win such a victory, however, our triumph was usually short-lived. No later than the next day we would find ourselves the subject of a major ambush by members of the same tribe. This could be very serious unless we happened to be armed with cricket bats, or even school satchels would do if they were sufficiently packed with books, to bash the boys with. Otherwise the only thing to do was to run for it: capture meant torture, even if it was only of an improvised, not very refined sort, which it more or less had to be in an open street. (At Colet Court, where there were places hidden from view in the playground, to which few masters ever penetrated, torture could mean having drawing pins pushed into the palms of one’s hands.) Even so, we sometimes arrived at school, ourselves blubbing, with bloody noses and straw hats stove in and, worst of all, late, in which case we were reported. It is perhaps not surprising that when things got really bad we took to crossing Hammersmith Broadway by the forbidden route.

However, these misfortunes were soon forgotten travelling home to Ther Boiler in the evenings on top of a No. 9 or 73 open bus, bombarding other boys on the tops of other buses with peashooters or squirting water pistols at them; whistling at the girls from St Paul’s Girls’ School, with whom social intercourse while travelling was discouraged; hiding under the canvas covers, which could be put up over the seats in wet weather, to avoid paying the fare; or better still, waiting for the buses of the Westminster or Premier pirate bus companies, that were fighting a battle for survival against the London General Omnibus Company. Their drivers used to shoot ahead of the sedate red Generals at a tremendous rate and scoop up all the customers, so that, when the Generals arrived, which had to observe a time schedule, the passengers were already half way home. The pirates had no ticket inspectors to speak of, and often their conductors used to let schoolchildren ride free.

But these early back street encounters were as nothing compared with the risks one ran when one was older and was required to wear the ludicrous uniform decreed at St Paul’s – black jacket, striped trousers, stiff white collar, black tie. In winter, boys who had attained a certain height wore bowler hats and carried rolled umbrellas.

These last two items, although they conferred a certain, barely tangible, status on those who wore them in the company of their fellow Paulines, had the reverse effect on those wearing them all alone, for example in the Hammersmith Bridge Road.

By this time, aged fifteen or so, it did not matter whether I went to school by way of Hammersmith Broadway or the back street route wearing such an outfit. There were just as many possibilities of being elbowed, tripped or jeered at on the bridge itself (a nasty place for ‘an encounter’), or in the Hammersmith Bridge Road, by what I now recognized were no longer schoolboys but semi-grown men. I now walked to school from choice, finding it too much of a bore to queue up for a bus at Ther Boiler in what was always the rush hour when I set out.

Although the penalty for not wearing a hat, whether a bowler, a school cap or a straw hat, was quite severe (a beating usually administered by a prefect), I preferred at this age to be beaten rather than draw attention to myself by wearing any of these sorts of headgear, just as by this time I was prepared to risk punishment for talking with girls I knew from St Paul’s Girls’ School on their way home by bus, some of whom also removed their hats but for a different reason – because they were good-looking and did not want to look like schoolgirls.

The only good thing about this crazy outfit was the umbrella. Less lethal than a cricket bat (with which if you hit someone really hard you might easily kill him), the umbrella, used as one would use a rifle with a bayonet or as an outsize truncheon, rather like those carried by the mounted police, was an ideal weapon.

Uncivilized as my behaviour may seem today, in a more squeamish but much more dangerous age, I can only plead that I had no choice. The penalty of defeat or, even worse, capture, would have been by this time much more serious than anything I experienced at Colet Court.

As a result of this misuse, my umbrella and those of my schoolfellows who found themselves in similar situations soon became useless for the purpose for which they were intended, either failing to open when it rained and they were needed, or else opening and falling to pieces.

These journeys from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the streets of Hammersmith altogether continued for eight years of my life (not including the period when, as a small child, I attended the Froebel kindergarten in Baron’s Court). In me they engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger and despair that some nineteenth-century travellers experienced in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the Central Highlands of New Guinea. And even today and now with even more reason, I sometimes experience a chilly sensation when walking alone down a narrow south London street.

CHAPTER EIGHT Lands and Peoples (#ulink_0d0b2c4f-63e2-5de3-aece-6436f3cb5337)

Up to now the reader may feel, and with some justification, that my travels have been of a somewhat parochial nature. By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.

This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.

What distinguished Lands and Peoples from other similar publishing ventures was that it was illustrated with colour photographs. ‘Marvellous as photography is, in one sense it has failed,’ the editor wrote. ‘The colour photograph is a dream … Here it is that the bold idea of Lands and Peoples has succeeded beyond all expectations. What Science has failed to do, Art has done … Some seven hundred photographs from all over the world have been coloured by artists from original sources, so that they become actual photographs with colour true to life, a remarkable anticipation of the final triumph of the camera that will show the world as it really is, in all its glow of red and green and gold.’ It was no hollow claim. The colours were in fact more true to life than those produced from much of the colour film in use today.

What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box at Three Ther Mansions, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.

Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’

I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.

In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.

In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.

In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.

In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.

Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving girls of the Abruzzi; Flemings and Walloons – little Belgium’s two sturdy races; Macedonian women weaving fine cloth with deft fingers; haughty-looking redskins decked in eagle’s feathers and wampum; Germany – rich country of an industrious nation; and so on, and so on.