CHAPTER I PRELUDE

§ 1

CATHERINE thought: Day is white, Night is black, but sometimes it is half-white and half-black.... There were five knobs on the brass rail of the bed: one of them would come off.... The baker came to the door every night and said: “And how is Cathie?” ...

It was cold, and blue flames flickered on top of the coals in the fire-grate. They said: “Lappappappap....” The Man tore off his collar from the stud—“plock”—then he screwed off his boots—“Hr-rooch—flop ... Hr-rooch—flop.” ... The mother said: “Cathie’s asleep: don’t make such a noise.” ...

Then her mother carried her past the brown banisters up to bed.... It was nearly black. The pumping-engine at the water-works went: “Chug-chug ... chug-chug ... chug-chug-chug....”

There were five knobs on the brass rail of the bed....

§ 2

The Man was Father.

Every morning mother called upstairs: “John: come on! Past eight”... and father said: “Just about to.” The sun fell in a slant over the table and climbed up the wall. Father ate porridge and milk: he went “Ooflip-oorooflip.”

The sunlight slid off the table on to the floor. There was nothing to do except listen to the clock. It went “tick-tock—tick-tock”—then it [Pg 12] went “ticky-ticky.” ... The milkman said: “Mornin’, m’m. Lavly mornin’. Thenk you, m’m. Mornin’, m’m.” ...

The sunlight ran away....

The face of the man next door had a big bulge. Mother said it was called a goitre. You had them in Derbyshire. The man’s name was Jopson. All the street-children used to follow him singing “Old father Jopson”—like this:

There were other fathers besides old father Jopson. There was one whom Catherine had never seen. He was called “Ch-artinevin,” but he was not like old father Jopson....

Every night her mother sang:

and made her talk to our father, Ch-artinevin. Only Ch-artinevin never said anything in reply.

There were two places where little girls went to. One was heaven, the other was hell. Hell was hot, heaven was cold. Heaven was full of white tiles and marble-slabs, like a fish-shop. But hell would be far too hot for you even if you were feeling cold. It would be a pity to go to hell, especially in the warm weather. Sometimes her father said: “O Hell!” ...

§ 3

Father was an elementary school teacher at the Downlands Road Council School. In winter and on wet nights in summer he sat indoors and put great sprawling ticks and crosses on exercise-books. Sometimes he frowned while he was working: Catherine used to watch him.

He was a little man and he wore cycling stockings under his trousers. [Pg 13] Every fine night he put on an old Norfolk tweed jacket and went out into the garden with the two ends of the waistband dangling behind him. He would bend down and make minute examinations of plants. He would twine sweet-pea tendrils round their sticks. Sometimes he would pounce upon a weed and remove it with cruel precision.... On Saturday afternoons he took a bucket and went into the roads to collect horse-manure. To Catherine Saturday afternoon was always signalized by the hard scraping of the kitchen shovel on the gritty surface of the roadway.

Mother was big and billowy. She kept her hair in papers during the mornings and wore stays whose ribbed outline showed through the back of her blouse. She talked more than father. At the Duke Street Methodist Chapel she appeared in the front row of the choir, whilst father took round the collection-plate. She was vaguely religious and vaguely patriotic and vaguely sentimental. When she said “John!” very slowly, father knew he had better be careful.

Catherine sat in the front pew on a Sunday morning, and wondered what it was all about. Why had mother got her hat on? ... Why did everybody come here once a week? What was the man in the round box talking about? Her mother had said, “About God, Cathie.” But he didn’t say God; he said Gahd. Sometimes Ch-artinevin was mentioned and Catherine caught the words with enthusiasm. It was plain that Ch-artinevin was a well-known personage.

The little boy next to her had curly hair. He was eating peppermints. During the prayer he kept taking them out of his mouth to see if they got smaller. Once he gave her one. It was very nice, but she cracked it during the benediction, and it was a loud crack.

Father stood at the door shaking hands with people. He said: “Good evening, Mrs. Lawson”—“Good evening, Ethel”—“Good evening, Miss Picksley, shall we be seeing you at the Band of Hope on Tuesday?”

And to Catherine he said:

[Pg 14]

“Go and wait in the back pew; there’s a Kermunion.”

A Kermunion, at any rate, was interesting....

§ 4

Father, being an elementary schoolteacher, did not send Catherine to an elementary school. She went to Albany House (principal, Miss Leary, L.R.C.P.). Miss Leary wore her hair in a knob and said to Catherine: “Darling, if you do that again I shall have to smack you hard.”

Catherine learnt: Solomon was the wisest man that ever lived; Gibraltar belongs to England; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; Henry the First never smiled again; three barleycorns one inch; the messenger rushed up to Wolfe saying, “They run, they run!”—“Who run, who run?” cried Wolfe....

On wet winter days the fireguard was hung with steaming clothes. The row of benches was a mere misty vista of wet noses and pocket-handkerchiefs. Everywhere was the stench of damp mackintoshes. Catherine sat by the window and looked through the streaming panes. She could see Polly, who brought them cups of cocoa in the middle of the morning, washing up the breakfast things in the kitchen. Every now and then the water gurgled out of the slopstone into the sink and made Jack, the black retriever dog, cautiously open one eye in his kennel. Catherine liked Jack. He was very staid and solemn, his sole dissipation being the crunching of snails. Miss Leary said: “Catherine, I do declare you are looking out of that window again! How often have I told you ...” etc., etc.

Every Friday afternoon as a special treat they had reading out of a reading-book. It was not like “Pat sat on the mat: is that Pat’s mat?” and the sentences about the cat and rat; it was a real book of adventures, the adventures of a boy and his uncle at the seaside. The avuncular relationship seemed to consist entirely in a readiness to return prompt and plausible answers to all sorts of questions. Uncle Tom and his nephew carried between them a complete outfit of odds and ends, marbles, pieces of string, oranges, scissors, card-board, cubes [Pg 15] and prisms, even jars and glass-funnels, and it was their custom to perform experiments with these upon all suitable occasions, wherever they might chance to be. The observations of passers-by, including park-keepers and bath-chairmen, were not recorded. Local byelaws seemed never to impede them from digging up roots and defacing flower-beds.

§ 5

Day followed on day and Catherine grew. As she walked by the sides of brick walls her eye ran along the lines of mortar tapering into the distance. Even she noticed how she kept rising brick by brick until the mortar-line that her eye followed was somewhere between four and five feet high. She left off her very childish habits, such as walking on the cracks of the pavements.... She ceased to ask absurd unanswerable questions about trams and buses; she stopped lamenting if she failed to secure a window-seat in the train. But she was still a child. She still sang out after old father Jopson.

She discovered that the second line of the hymn was not “Nighties drawing nigh,” as she had naturally supposed, but “Night is drawing nigh.” The discovery was a disappointment.

She began to read. She read Alice in Wonderland and The Walrus and the Carpenter. She even began to write. At Albany House she wrote in large copybook style: “Honesty is the best policy.” Once also she wrote on the back of a birthday card: “Dear Auntie Ethel, Many Happy Returns of the Day, from Your Affectionate Niece, Catherine.” ... And on the wooden fence at the end of the road she wrote in chalk: “Freddy McKellar is a Soppy Fool.”

She began to do naughty things. She played in the game of “last across”; she hung on to the backs of passing motor-lorries. She danced in the streets to the tune of itinerant barrel-organs. Something may here be said of her appearance. She had hair of a rich and fiery red, [Pg 16] and eyes of a fierce compound of brown and green. In the summer-time her face was freckles all over. She was not good-looking, and few people would have called her even pretty. But she was known everywhere in the vicinity of Kitchener Road as “Cathie Weston, that red-haired girl.”

§ 6

In the Co-operative Stores the shopman kept her waiting out of her turn. He had seen her sticking “transfers” on his shop-window and he did not like her. The Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative and Industrial Society was an imposing institution with patent bacon-slicers and profuse calendar-distributing habits. Behind the polished mahogany counter the shopman fluttered about, all sleek and dapper, and in front stood Catherine, tired and impatient. There was a large co-operative almanac on the wall, and this she used to peruse diligently, supplementing therefrom the meagre knowledge of English history given her at Albany House. The almanac introduced a sort of miscellaneous historical calendar—for example: September 22nd. Battle of Zutphen, 1586. September 23rd. Massacres in Paris, 1789. Then in great staring red letters: September 24th. Opening of the Head Office of the Bockley and Upton Rising Friendly Co-operative and Industrial Society by Lord Fitzroy, 1903. With absolutely no sense of historical perspective at all, Catherine was quite prepared to believe that the

last of these was the most prominent because it was also the most important.

When Kitchener Road was first built, in the full-flood of the Soudanese war-fever, it was for a time drowsily suburban. Then a too enterprising religious organization built a tin-mission at one end of it. The mission had a corrugated iron roof. Until then Kitchener Road had not quite decided whether it would tend in the social sense to rise or to fall. The corrugated iron roof forced a decision. Kitchener Road fell, and fell rapidly. From drowsiness it degenerated into frowsiness. A sleek off-licence appeared, with yellow-glazed tiles and an ungrammatical notice board: “No beer to be drank on the premises nor [Pg 17] on the public highway.” Passing the tarred fence at the upper end the pedestrian ran the whole gamut of flippancy and indecency. And on the gate of the corner house could be seen—a final tribute to disappointed hopes—that sultry hall-mark of respectability: “No Hawkers, No Circulars, No Canvassers.” When the headmaster of the Downsland Road Council School heard that an intending pupil lived in Kitchener

Road, he generally said: “I am very sorry, but we have no more room. If I were you I should try at Cubitt Lane.” ... The headmaster of the Downsland Road Council School did not like the headmaster of the Cubitt Lane Council School.... And on all the tram-standards in Bockley a handbill declared that “On July 11th, at the Upton Rising Petty Sessions, Gabriel Handcote, 21, and Richard Moulton, 19, both of Kitchener Road, Bockley, were fined 40s. and costs for travelling on a tramway-car with intent to avoid payment of fare.”

§ 7

Bockley was a sprawling urban district on the edge of the metropolitan area. Itself and Upton Rising had spread till they touched like adjacent blobs of ink on blotting-paper. But Upton Rising was aristocratic, plutocratic.... Its inhabitants had first-class season-tickets, wore spats, and read The Times on the 9.27 “Up.” They became district councillors, bazaar-openers, hospital-subscribers and such like. They wrote letters to the Bockley and Upton Rising Advertiser complaining of municipal apathy in the matter of water-carts. They said “Bockley must have a park to keep it out of mischief,” and lo! Bockley had one, with “keep-off-the-grass” notices and geometrical flower-beds, and a code of byelaws half a yard long, and a constant clientele of old-age pensioners and children flying paper windmills....

And in the meantime Bockley became conscious of its destiny. It bore all the unmistakable signs of a township that expects to be great some day—insurance agencies out of all proportion to the population, a [Pg 18] Carnegie library, and a melancholy statue outside the Town Hall....

The origin of Bockley is simple and unconfusing.

Somewhere early on in the latter half of the nineteenth century the Great Eastern Railway Company, seeking parliamentary sanction to extend its suburban lines to Bockley, was compelled by law to carry workmen to and from Bockley and the City for twopence.... It was that twopence which made Bockley....

§ 8

In the front room of No. 24, Kitchener Road there was a Collard and Collard piano. It had jaundiced keys and a bosom of yellow silk interlaced with fretwork. Most of the lower notes said “Hanng-g-g,” and the five bottom ones all said the same “hang-g-g.” ... The piano-tuner came. He was of the “ping-ping-wrench” and the “see-what-can-be-done” variety. He said:

“It’s bin a good interment in its time.... Pity the dampness got in it.”

Catherine watched him as he tightened the wires and prodded the notes. At the end he played Thalberg’s “Home, Sweet Home,” with variations.

That night Mrs. Weston said: “Now that the pianer’s bin tuned you might start havin’ lessons.... I’ll see Mr. Monkhouse about it to-morrer.”

And Catherine bought a shilling instruction book and learned: E G B D F—Every Good Boy Deserves Favour....

Mr. Monkhouse was a versatile man. In the Bockley Advertiser he announced: “Mr. Reginald Monkhouse has still a few dates vacant during April and May for engagements as entertainer, expert conjurer, pianist, accompanist or children’s lecturer Write Box 77.” At Masonic dinners Mr. Monkhouse sang “Where did you get that hat?” and other relics of the Victorian music-hall stage. Every evening from 8 till 11 he played the piano and conducted the orchestra at the Victoria Hall, Bockley, vamping with his left hand and beating time with the first finger of his right. And on Saturdays and at odd times whenever possible he [Pg 19] gave pianoforte tuition at the rate of sixpence a lesson.... He was always shabbily-dressed, always good-humoured, patient and not too conscientious. The little front parlour where he lodged in Cubitt Lane was full of playbills and concert programmes and signed menu-cards....

He gave Catherine a piece called “White Wings,” and initiated her into a few elementary five-finger exercises. She was not particularly apt in picking them up, but at the end of forty-five minutes he said:

“Good-night, my dear. You’ll be a female Paderewski before long....”

Those were the days when a pianist had achieved the signal distinction of becoming known to the man-in-the-street. Paderewski was as well known as Krüger.

§ 9

Freddie McKellar and Catherine Weston were seated side by side in the back bench of the Duke Street Schoolroom. The occasion was a Band of Hope entertainment. Mr. Weston was on the platform, surrounded by weird articles of glass and metal.

“I want you all to notice carefully,” he said. “Here I have a jar of clean pure water. The little fellow who is gambolling about so playfully inside it is a stickleback. He is having a fine time because the water is so pure and fresh.... Now watch ... here I have a flask of whisky.... I pour it into the water ... so.... I want you to watch very carefully....”

Freddie McKellar, aged fifteen, bent his head slightly to the left in order to see round the corner of Mrs. Mole’s hat. In doing so he felt the soft spray-like touch of Catherine’s hair against his ear.... It was not unpleasant.

Catherine was dreamily conscious that something tense was going to happen.

“It doesn’t always work,” she whispered, vaguely, “some sticklebacks like it.” ... She bent her head slightly to the right to circumvent the obstruction of Mr. Mole’s shiny hairless head. To Freddie McKellar it [Pg 20] seemed that this time, instead of his ear touching her hair, her hair had performed the more positive act of brushing against his ear. The difference, though subtle, was not to be ignored.

“Now,” cried Mr. Weston, brandishing aloft his jar with the stickleback inside it either dead or drunk or in some way incapacitated for further movement, “if the effect of this foul spirit upon this tiny animal is ...”

“There’s refreshments afterwards, ain’t there?” said Freddie, sotto voce.

“Yes,” she whispered, hoarsely. The tragedy of the dying stickleback, “butchered to make a Roman holiday,” had made her unwontedly solemn.

... “Now,” proceeded Mr. Weston, “if somebody will kindly lower the lights, I will show you on the screen some of the effects of strong drink.... First of all, perhaps you would care to have a look at a drop of whisky as it is seen through the lens of a microscope....”

The lights went out in successive “pops.”

Freddie McKellar’s left hand slowly closed over Catherine’s right one.

“Ugh,” said Catherine, presumably at the horrible picture on the screen. Then the thought came to her (she had had no experience of such matters)—“He must be flirting with me.”

Simultaneously there came to Freddie McKellar (who, for his age, had had considerable experience of such matters) the thought: “She must be flirting with me.”

And at the same time Gladys Stockwell nudged Bessie Millar and whispered: “Just look at Cathie Weston and Freddie McKellar ... at their age, too....” (Gladys was twenty-three and unbeautiful.)

In the refreshment room afterwards Catherine and Freddie sat together on a bench munching ham-sandwiches. You were only expected to take one ham-sandwich, but Catherine had already taken three and Freddie five. The caretaker was stoking up the fire at the other side of the room.

[Pg 21]

“Ain’t you two goin’ ter join in the Musical Chairs?” he remarked, contemplatively, “they’ve started ’em in the other room.”

Freddie took another ham-sandwich.

“I don’t feel extra like Musical Chairs,” he replied.

The caretaker grinned and shuffled out with the empty coke-scuttle. It was precisely at that moment that Catherine began to dislike the scent of Freddie’s lavishly spread hair-oil....

Catherine thought: “I don’t think I like him at all. I wonder if he knows it was me who chalked up on the fence, ‘Freddie McKellar is a soppy fool.’ ... ’Cos he is one, really....”

And then suddenly Freddie had an unfortunate inspiration.

He put his arm round her neck and touched her cheek. In an instant she was up and flaring and standing before him.

“What on earth did you do that for?” she cried, passionately; “I don’t want your smelly fingers on me!” (“Smelly fingers” was an attribute she bestowed on everybody she disliked.)

He was astonished at her vehemence, but tried to carry it off laughingly.

“Come back,” he called, advancing to her, “and don’t be silly ... silly ... don’t be ... silly....” He was rather nervous. His nervousness made him desperate.