He avoided breaking his neck, however, and miraculously died in bed. By all accounts, he was a man much loved; even the gipsies, whose wandering tribes he doctored, knew him as their friend, and often when he was riding on his twenty-mile round he would stop for breakfast or dinner at one of their encampments. Gipsies have long memories; and only two years ago I was told that the tinkers still talk of him, and his mercurial chestnut mare which danced and pirouetted continually, while my grandfather sat it like a jockey, one light hand on the reins, the other holding his little black bag.

The Bourgeois at Work

My relations on my father’s side were much more stolid; they would never, I think, have sat down to a dish of roast hedgehog at a Romany camp fire. They had lived in and about Elmbury for so long, and moreover there were so many of them, that they seemed to have proprietary rights in the place. They were Mayors, Justices of the Peace, Churchwardens. Most of them were comfortably off, none of them was rich. Most of them were able, few of them were clever. In fact, they mistrusted cleverness. That was the sort of people they were. Cleverness, they thought, generally got you into trouble; and it was true enough that the only one of them who was really clever finished up by drinking himself to death. His name was Clem; and he was brilliant. He became a Barrister, which was outside the family tradition, and upon the threshold of a great career he paused, hesitated, and turned back. He liked the local pub better. But when we children asked what had happened to him, and why Clem who was so gay and handsome did not come to visit us any more, there was always an uncomfortable pause. The family didn’t like talking about Clem. “He was very clever, of course, but cleverness isn’t everything.” We had to be content with that.

The others, lacking this terrible handicap of cleverness, prospered moderately and lived long respectable lives. They were all large and substantial, rather like family portraits come to life; Uncle Reg the doctor; Uncle Jim the lawyer; Uncle Tom and my father, the auctioneers. They sat together upon the Town Council; they took it in turns to be Mayor, and Chairman of the local Conservative Association; they administered charities and trusts with meticulous care; they shared a monopoly of the post of churchwarden of the Abbey. The editor of the local paper had little trouble when they died; the same obituary notice, with a few trifling alterations would serve for all of them. “He played a prominent part in Public Life.” And that indeed was their tradition; so long as the Public was not too large. Elmbury with its five thousand inhabitants was just big enough; if you ventured into the world beyond, you got mixed up in wider politics, which were administered by clever fellows; and clever fellows were generally shady fellows, and by no means to be trusted.

Gallery of Relations

Beyond all these uncles and their wives, like the widening ripples round a splash in a pond extended a vast complication of distant and yet more distant relations: a network, an inescapable spider’s web of kith and kin. Most of them had enormous families; and this resulted in countless cousins.

You might say that this regiment, this veritable Army Corps, was based upon Elmbury. Many of its members lived there; the others, who travelled farther afield, returned there from time to time to go into winter quarters; and unless the accident of death overtook them suddenly, they all came back there to die. I cannot write about Elmbury unless I mention them too; for they grew about the place as the ivy wraps itself round a tree.

Since even the wandering ones would ultimately return, there was a family tradition that relations must be “kept up with.” Keeping up with relations was a stern duty; you failed in that duty if you let them fall into desuetude, if they “got out of touch.” In order to prevent this, you had to write them letters at Christmas and send them diaries on their birthdays; and whenever it occurred to my mother that Aunt Nancy or Cousin Gerald was being neglected, was falling into disuse, she immediately invited the forgotten one to Tudor House in order that the dusty and rusty relationship might be polished up and oiled and put into running order again.

If they could not come to you, it was your duty to go to them. Great-aunt Mary-Jane was bedridden, and wore a nightcap, and looked just like the wolf which frightened Red Riding Hood. We were frequently taken to visit her, in the dark Victorian house at the top of Elmbury High Street, and she gave us curious presents, such as stamps pierced through with a darning needle and strung tightly on a piece of thread, so that they formed a kind of snake, wriggly and tenuous. Alas, the snake was composed of Penny Blacks and Twopenny Blues; and the five hundred stamps which articulated it would be worth, to-day, about two hundred pounds if Great-aunt Mary-Jane hadn’t in every case poked her red-hot darning-needle through the young queen’s head.

Other relations, more mobile, came to visit us; a succession of aunts and uncles, of first and second and third cousins, of cousins goodness knows how many times removed. It took about a year for the wheel to turn full-circle; and then, like the second house at the pictures, it began all over again, but one had forgotten the characters which appeared at the beginning; so that the procession of relatives seemed endless indeed.

They did not, however, unduly oppress us. The house was big, and they troubled us children very little, intruding into our privacy only now and then, when my mother no doubt said to them: “But of course you’d like to see the children …” and they, liking nothing less, warmly agreed. So Old Nanny, warned in advance, spat on a handkerchief to rub imaginary smuts off our faces; and we were made ready in the nursery, hair brushed, toys tidied away, ready for the awful visitation—of rich Aunt Blanche or poor Cousin Minnie or fashionable Aunt Doll or soldierly Cousin Farley who was in the Guards, or decrepit old Cousin Tom Holland who’d fought in the Indian Mutiny.