Portrait of Elmbury
JOHN MOORE
Portrait of Elmbury
Contents
Confession
Part One
Through the Window
Part Two
Background to Boyhood
Part Three
Going, Going
Part Four
The Uneasy Peace
Part Five
The Chimes at Midnight
Part Six
Indian Summer
“Elmbury” is a real place in the sense that I have taken as it were the ground-plan of a real town and built somewhat freely upon it. Likewise this account of the fortunes of its people in the years between the wars is built upon a framework of truth; but I haven’t hesitated to alter names, to play tricks with time and geography, and where necessary to import one or two original and purely imaginary wrongdoers in cases where a selection from among our ready-made “Elmbury” ones might have resulted in an action for libel.
Background to Childhood—Punch and Judy Show—Beauty in Ugliness—“Fields Flocks Flowers”—A Vision of Piers Plowman—Missed Opportunities—Odd-job Man’s Delight— English Eccentrics—The Bourgeois at Play—The Bourgeois at Work—Gallery of Relations—The Colonel—Faces at the Window —Hopscotch, Hoops, Hobbly-’onkers—Pistol, Bardolph and Nym— The Town Scoundrels—Oyez! Oyez!—Passing Acquaintances— The Mystery of Fred—Christmas Fair—Elmbury Goes to War
Background to Childhood
The loveliest house in Elmbury, which was called Tudor House, looked out across a wide main street upon the filthiest slum I have ever set eyes on in England. Few people saw anything incongruous in this, for in those days Elmbury was a higgledy-piggledy place, of incomparable beauty and incomparable squalor, and its inhabitants had retained something of the spirit of the Elizabethans, who could enjoy Hamlet in the interval between an afternoon at the bear-pit and a visit to the brothel, when both bear-pit and brothel lay within a stone’s throw of the theatre.
In Tudor House I spent most of my early childhood. That is literally true, for apart from brief formal “walks” with Old Nanny we didn’t go out much, and since I was erroneously supposed to be “not very strong” I was always in the condition of having a cold, of having had a cold, or of being liable to catch a cold if I got wet. So Tudor House was my world; and with its winding staircases, its dark oak-panelled corridors, its numerous exciting junk-rooms and attics, and its curious and delightful back-garden, it provided a domain wide enough for any small boy.
The garden, especially, was a child’s paradise. It was not too big, so that we knew every stick and stone of it; and since it was by no means a source of pride either to our parents or to the occasional odd-jobbing gardener, we could do whatever we liked in it without reproof. Moreover, it had an unique and thrilling smell, a sort of jungle-smell made up, I suppose, of damp rotting leaves, wet sandstone walls, a stagnant well, and dead cats in the nearby river: you would scarcely term it a fragrance, but we loved it, somehow we associated it with adventure and mysterious things.
No doubt the extraordinarily high walls were the cause of the garden being so damp. One of these was provided by a Drill Hall wherein the local Volunteers ineffectually paraded once a week; another, of tremendous size, unscalable even by cats, was a bastion against our next-door neighbours: it need have been no bigger if the Picts and the Scots had been encamped on the other side of it. The third wall, most unnecessarily, shut out the slow river, with its barges, its rowing-boats, and its immobile patient fishermen. A great oaken door, however, which creaked terrifyingly like that which gives entrance to the home of the omnipotent gods, opened on reluctant hinges to these delights.
The high walls, which seemed to cloister the garden rather than to imprison it, were in themselves extremely beautiful. One of them was made of Old Red Sandstone, and the other two of that pinkish-orange Georgian brick which becomes almost incandescent and glows with an inward light when the sun shines on it. The Drill Hall was covered with Virginia Creeper, its leaves redder than robins’ breasts in autumn. The wall-against-the-neighbours was hung with ivy, a dusty hiding-place for sparrows’ nests, for small yellow moths, and for those big downy brown ones called Old Ladies. The river wall, of weathered sandstone, was a background to the most delightful herbaceous border imaginable, a small-scale jungle in which peonies, stocks, marigolds and red-hot pokers fought for life, and out of which triumphantly rose great hollyhocks and even more gigantic sunflowers, a few of which each season topped the wall and, having looked towards the Promised Land, bowed their heads towards it and contentedly died.
For the rest, the garden possessed one climbable tree, a laburnum, seasonally weeping golden rain; a bush of white lilac; a sort of shrubbery about five yards square, just big enough for one thrush’s nest each spring; white jasmine on an outhouse wall; a small wicket-scarred lawn; a “sand-pit” in which we children were supposed to play (but we had better games); and a disused well, with an old ramshackle wooden cover to it, which we believed to be the entrance to a monks’ secret passage.
Above the garden towered the big house. Its “backs” were as beautiful as its façade. You went up some wide, semi-circular stone steps on to a flagged courtyard around which stood the half-timbered building, whitewashed between its sepia oak beams. The back-door was a tremendous piece of oak, studded with nails, with a knocker heavy enough to wake the dead; there were strange scars on the oak as if someone with an axe had tried to force his way in. Inside there was a sudden cool darkness of stone-floored corridors, sculleries, pantries and whatnot, and then the spice-scented kitchen with Old Cookie, if she were sober, busy over her pots and pans. Then you came to the hall, its panelled walls hung with brass ladles, a curious form of decoration (but pictures would have looked cold and lonely against the dark oak); then, off the hall, the drawing-room, very long and light, with big windows and a pale oak parquet floor—the walls abounding in more brass ladles, in copper warming-pans, shelves of pewter tankards, cabinets of valuable china, a housemaid’s nightmare; and then the dining-room, as cosily dark as the drawing-room was airily-bright, with the royal coat-of-arms (we never knew why) carved above the mantelpiece.
There was also a fair-sized room with white enamelled walls, called “the day nursery,” which had a comfortable window-seat beneath its leaded windows, looking out on to the main street. This was the place where my sister and I were most often to be found, with our noses pressed close to the diamond-shaped panes, gazing out with lively interest and eager anticipation at the black and gaping maw of Double Alley, which was the name of the slum opposite us. Some of the panes had queer distorting whorls in them, so that from certain angles Double Alley was double indeed; and others were cloudy with a mysterious pinkish cloudiness, imparting to objects seen through them an unearthly flush. Tinted thus, the entrance to the alley, with the usual quarrelsome and gesticulating figures standing about it, was not unlike the yawning jaws of a medieval hell.
Punch and Judy Show
Indeed, even among Elmbury’s slums, Double Alley was something to be wondered at. Respectable women drew their skirts closer about them as they passed its nauseous opening; even the doctor and the priest were unwilling adventurers on the rare occasions when they were summoned to visit it; and policemen, who were more frequent visitors, took care to go in pairs when their duties took them there.
One of the most extraordinary things about Double Alley was that little children who lived within it would run about naked, in the full light of day. This served to sharpen the impression which the place gave to strangers, that it was populated by fiends.
We children had no such illusion. We knew very well that the inhabitants of Double Alley were flesh-and-blood. (The blood, indeed, was only too evident on Saturday nights.) Their too-human frailties were daily manifested to us. We knew the names, the relationships, and a large part of the life-histories of almost all that piteous riff-raff. The ragged women, the drunken men, the screaming wanton wenches, the rickety children, were more real to us than many of our relations; far more real than the visitors in evening clothes who came to dine with our parents and afterwards played the piano, and sang, in the drawing-room. We never had much use for such singing; but when Nobbler Price came home from the pub roaring and bellowing we thoroughly appreciated the entertainment. It was very much better than When Lady Betty Walks Abroad or Melisande.
A fair example of Double Alley’s inhabitants would be Mr.
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