“Ho! ho! ho!” she would cry. “Ships yuds is chip this morning!” Sheep’s heads were symbols of stupidity: thus she reproved the inquisitive who so rudely stared at her. She would sing, too, improvising as she went along:

“Black Sal,
Jolly old gal,
What do the Doctor say?
He wants to put her away.
Poor Black Sal,
Poor old gal!”

It was related of her, in later years, that she died two deaths. The first occurred in her own home, and when the breath had ceased in her, her husband brought out a bottle of gin and shared it with some of the neighbours, either to celebrate his release from her or to sustain him in his loss. It is recorded that as he poured out the drink he glanced at the corpse upon the bed and remarked, sententiously: “Black Sal, thee’s sarved me many a trick in thy time but never thee’s sarved me a trick like this.” But Black Sal, half-way to Gehenna, smelled the gin, hastened back, and finished the bottle. After this first death she survived for many years, until at last, becoming destitute, she was taken to the workhouse where among other indignities she suffered that of being forcibly washed. This killed her: and the chilly hard-hearted Institution provided no bottle of gin to lure her back to life.

Her appearance, in the days when she dwelt in the filthiest cottage of all Double Alley, was horrific in the extreme. She wore a black bonnet, a black shawl, and a black ragged skirt; her bonnet, which was tall, elaborate and decorated with black feathers, gave her the overdressed appearance of a witch on holiday, one of the Weird Sisters gone galivanting. Her face was almost as black as her clothes. When I began to learn Greek I thought of the Eumenides as Black Sals; but in spite of her frightful appearance, we children never feared her nor imagined that there was anything malevolent about her. She was just another character in the pageant; and when we met her in the street we said “Good-morning, Black Sal,” and she answered politely, “Mornin’, Master John … Mornin’, Miss Daphne.”

One more Hogarthian figure, and then I have done with them. Nobbler Price did not actually inhabit Double Alley, but kept a tiny greengrocer’s shop nearby; he also possessed a weedy patch of back garden, abutting on the alley, and a miserable-looking nannygoat which was tethered to a peg and which demonstrated by its circumscribed nibbling the great truths discovered by Euclid and Pythagoras.

When Nobbler was drunk, he became maniacal. I saw him once careering down the street in his pony-cart, whipping his wretched little pony into a canter, while two stout policemen hung on to the bridle; and when they seemed likely to slow him up he picked up his mongrel dog that rode in the cart beside him and shied it with remarkable accuracy at the nearest policeman’s head. It was Nobbler’s chief obsession, when he was drunk, that he wanted to shoot his wife, of whom in sober moments he was extremely fond; but while with drunken clumsiness he searched for his shotgun, she would take shelter at a neighbour’s house, where she remained until his fit passed. On one of these occasions, in frustrated rage, being determined to shoot something, Nobbler went out into his back garden and shot the nannygoat.

Yet when he was dead, many years later, Mrs. Price told me, with tears in her eyes, “I miss him. … Yes, I miss Nobbler. You see, sir, he was so good to I.”

And indeed the poor demented creature had his good qualities. Between bouts, he behaved to man and beast with the greatest gentleness; he was capable of strong loyalties and deep affections. He worshipped my father (who was often called to quieten him when he was drunk), and after my father’s death, when the lovely house had been sold to be turned into an hotel, Nobbler and his wife became for a time its caretakers. It stood empty for months, and once a week—every Sunday morning—Nobbler would walk two miles to bring my mother a draggled nosegay, of peonies, columbines, stocks and marigolds, from the herbaceous border against the sandstone wall.

Beauty in Ugliness

The appalling incongruity between our tall, beautiful house and the squat cavernous alley opposite; between our parents’ smooth-flowing and contented lives and the drunken brawls across the street; between our spoiled and rather pampered upbringing and the ribby nakedness of the slum children: all this sounds very shocking now. But it was part of a larger incongruity with which we grew up, scarcely noticing it: the extraordinary higgledy-pigglediness, the rich seething hotch-potch of a thousand ingredients, which was Elmbury itself. Elmbury was a small town, and such are generally supposed to be dull, and to be associated with aspidistras, and to infect the souls of their inhabitants with something mean and crabbed and petty, with ignorant “provincialism,” and with something specially reprehensible and circumscribed called a “small-town mentality.” But Elmbury wasn’t like that at all. It had infinite variety. It was splendid and it was sordid; but it certainly wasn’t dull.

Over it and dominating it rose the huge square tower of the Abbey: the finest Norman tower, some say, in the world. The Abbey itself, bigger than many cathedrals, loomed vastly out of its churchyard chestnuts and yews. But there was none of that “odour of sanctity,” which usually belongs to cathedral closes, about the immediate neighbourhood of Elmbury’s great church: no cloistered quietude, nothing sanctimonious or grave. Outside the churchyard gates the main road ran north to Birmingham and south to Bristol, and up and down it the heedless traffic flowed. Just across the road, exactly opposite the church, was a good, solid, half-timbered pub; it had a garden hedged with thick impenetrable yews, a secret place hidden from prying eyes, where old men played bowls till the light faded and younger folk played more mischievous games in the twilight. But adjoining this delightful garden (at the bottom of which a willowy stream flowed) was a large horrible red-brick building like a public lavatory; this was the grammar school.