I made him take off his own worm; and he was nearly sick. That evening, with Dick, Donald and Ted, I went to the Fair. We saw the Fat and the Hairy Women, the Pigmy, the Web-footed Man, and the Nameless Delights, which were so unimpressive that I have forgotten what they consisted of. We won armfuls of coconuts. We rode on the roundabouts and the swings and the cakewalk, we slid down the chute, and then stood at the bottom to watch three little wenches, with their skirts up to their middles, come tumbling down after us. We lifted them to their feet and took them on the swings. We bought them gingerbreads and sticky sweets. One was blonde, one was brunette, and one was redheaded; and later, when we left the crowded noisy streets and the weird white light of the naphtha flares, she taught me much more about Life than the parson had succeeded in doing.
Business Man
The time had now come for me to be articled to my uncle and to go into his office.
I was a lanky youth of seventeen. I had an astonishing store of knowledge about a number of things which were scarcely relevant to a commercial career. I could read the New Testament in Greek and recite much of the Georgics from memory. I knew the names of most wild flowers, could recognise most butterflies and moths and tell you their life-histories, knew the birds’ songs, their nests, and eggs, and had read the whole of Geikie’s Geology. I could sometimes catch fish when wise old anglers couldn’t; could shoot, ride a horse, sail a boat. I had read without discrimination every novel, play or biography I could lay hands on, and I swallowed poetry with the voracity of a sealion swallowing fish. My method (which makes me shudder to think of it now) was to obtain from the Public Library the collected works of some poet, Tennyson or Browning or Longfellow, and read the whole lot, slap through, from page one to the end. In this fashion I had read the whole of The Dynasts when I was sixteen.
With these qualifications I set out to become an auctioneer.
Grandstand for Sociologists—The Office—Words—Foot-and- Mouth —The Invisible Invasion—The Wind Blows Cold—The Idle Apprentices—Come Lassies and Lads—Satellite Villages—Songs at the Salutation—Market Day—Conversation-Piece—Market-Peartness and Illiteracy—Economics of Farming—To Be a Farmer’s Boy— Midnight Steeplechase—The Long View—Orchards—The Blow a-Blowing—Timber—Pubs—Roadhouse and Bar Parlour—Furniture Sales—The Crooked Craftsman—You’ve Got to Leave the Bed —Farewell to the Office—Turkey Trouble—We be Getting Old— Falstaff he is Dead—Tempora mutantur—Property Sale—Live and Dead Farming Stock—Tenant-Right—Ave atque Vale—The Pattern
Grandstand for Sociologists
The profession is not very highly regarded, as professions go; but if any earnest young student with a B.Sc. and little experience of life asks me the best way to begin the study of sociology I shall suggest at least two years in the office of an auctioneer.
Consider the opportunities provided by such a course. The auctioneer’s job brings him in touch with every class and person; we are all, at some time in our lives, landlords or tenants, buyers or sellers. It gives him the entry, from time to time, into every house in his district, great or small. So does the doctor’s profession, or the parson’s; but the doctor sees people only when they are ill, or when they think they are ill, and when the parson visits people they are either on their best behaviour or on the defensive. The auctioneer sees them at their best and worst; and usually at the time when some crisis, financial or otherwise, has disrupted their lives. He sees them when the head of the house has died; when their little business has gone smash; when they are in arrears with their rent; when the landlord has given them notice to quit; when the bum-bailie is seizing their furniture for debt; when they go bankrupt. He sees them when they are compelled by circumstances to sell their most precious possessions, and when they are covetous to buy the possessions of their neighbour. He sees homes set up, and homes broken; he sees poor men get rich and rich men ruined. He meets man in all his moods and all his manifestations: in sorrow, in avarice, in courage, in greed, in good fortune and bad, in the shadow of death itself.
Yes; the student of social science could do worse than become a clerk for a year or two in some such office as my uncle’s. But this is very much of an afterthought; for I myself was nothing of the kind. I was a tough young rascal with my head full of poetry and the rest of my interest divided pretty equally between horses, fishes, motor-bikes and girls.
The Office
The office stood in the High Street, quite close to Tudor House; by squinting sideways you could still see Double Alley out of its big plate-glass window.
It needed a coat of paint outside and a thoroughly good clean-up inside. It was shabby with the shabbiness of enormous respectability. A coat of paint might have suggested that it needed (like a tart) to advertise its presence. Such a notion would have been abhorrent to my uncle. As for cleaning it within, there were documents and shelves of books on which the dust had lain since 1750.
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