The other games were also seasonal, though it is not easy to understand why. Tops and hopscotch belonged to the winter, hoops to the early spring, marbles to high summer, and tipcat, as far as I can remember, to summer holidays. There was a strict convention governing these matters: a boy would as soon bowl a hoop in January as a man would ride in Rotten Row in a frock coat and top hat; yet in March, when the hoop season came in, not a single ragged guttersnipe would be seen without one. They were home-made, of course, as were the ingenious whip-tops which when lashed smartly would fly twenty yards through the air and continue to spin when they came to earth, and which were sometimes slotted so that they hummed like little aeroplanes. As for hopscotch, all that was needed was a piece of chalk; while tipcat demanded merely a peg sharpened at both ends and a stout stick with which to slog it. Only marbles could not be manufactured in Double Alley; you had to buy them, twenty-four for a penny, at any of the little nondescript shops which sold everything from babies’ comforters to butterfly-nets. The big glass ones, streaked with tricolour whorls of red, white and blue, cost much more—sometimes as much as a halfpenny each. These were the sovereigns in the guttersnipe currency; and when one rolled down the muddy gutter and fell with a plop through the grating into the drain it was a tragedy indeed.

Marbles had a strange, an ancient, and a poetic terminology which Alfie knew and paraded, but which to us was a mystery only half understood; we never truly mastered it. Other games, even more obscure, had wonderful rhymes associated with them, snatches of song, outlandish catches, and curious fragments of mumbo-jumbo which ran like this:

“Egdom, pegdom, penny-a-legdom,
Popped the lorum gee.
    Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
    Stick, stock, stone dead,
Out goes she.”

That sounded like poetry to us, half-heard through the window; it sounds like a sort of poetry to me still.

Pistol, Bardolph and Nym

It must have been about this time that we made the acquaintance of three good-for-nothings whose present disrepute—for they were notorious cadgers, scroungers, poachers and petty thieves —was somewhat mitigated by their past history of great deeds done in distant battles. What battles and where we never knew: Pistol frequently talked airily of Zulus and Afghans, Bardolph was accustomed to use fearful oaths which he said came from the Sudanese, and it was pretty well established that Nym at the age of seventeen had played some minor part in the relief of Lady-Smith. However, the Army had discovered before long that the three of them were more trouble than they were worth; so they had returned to Elmbury and to the dark disastrous alleys in which they had been spawned. We would watch them loafing and leering at the Double Alley entrance, chasing the wenches, begging from passers-by, and more than once we would see them borne away to the police-station for some offence of drunkenness or brawling.

Seen through the window, they were to us figures of high romance; we communicated with them by signs, and sometimes to the dismay of Old Nanny held conversation with them in the street. It was Bardolph who taught me how to make my first catapult, and Pistol, I think, from whom I picked up a lot of weird expressive phrases which shocked my parents.

At the age of thirty-five or so, they were already confirmed and incorrigible rogues. Magistrates and police despaired of them. And yet there was nothing mean nor sordid about their misdemeanours. Sheer mischief and a sort of impishness illuminated all their crimes. They had an air and even a kind of grace in wrong-doing; and although officially Elmbury had to regard them as a pest, the majority of people were inclined to look upon them as licensed jesters whom we should be sorry to lose. At Christmas-time they always formed themselves into a ragtime band, with tins and penny-whistles, and held the passers-by to ransom, and went begging from pub to pub until they were too drunk to continue any farther. On these occasions they always made their first call at Tudor House, since it was opposite their starting-point in Double Alley, and they would kick up a great and merry row outside the front door, beating on their tins and catawauling their seasonal song:

“Arise arise and make your mincepies!
A frosty night and a col’ morning!”

Then my father would go out to them and give them half a crown accompanied by a short lecture on their bad behaviour during the past year; and they would sweep off their caps and cry, “God bless you, Mr. Mayor, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to your good self and the Missus and the little ones; and so help us you’ll never see us in the dock again!” But of course at the first Court after the holiday they’d be up before the Bench once more and my father with a twinkle in his eye would admonish them: “Your promises are like piecrust, made to be broken. … Seven days.”

The Town Scoundrels

One annual pageant which gave us much pleasure was the slow and ponderous procession of the Town Council as they marched in a body to church on Mayor’s Sunday, which I think was the first Sunday after the election of the Mayor. It was traditional that they should attend on that day at whichever place of worship the Mayor belonged to; and you could pick out by their long faces the Nonconformists who were marching towards the Church of England and vice-versa; they had the air of men who know that their reluctant steps lead them towards the dangerous slopes of Hell, yet stern duty compels them on.

Whichever church it went to, the procession, which started at the Town Hall, had to pass our window. It was preceded by the Town Band, which came only second to the Fire Brigade as a comic turn to delight the inhabitants of Elmbury. Behind the band shuffled the Mayor, Aldermen, and Councillors in their appropriate robes; the Town Clerk in his wig: the Town Crier, the Beadle and other officials; and behind them, and out of step (for nobody could march behind the Council and keep step) came the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Wolfcubs, Brownies, Church Lads’ Brigade, and that despised handful of Territorials who were destined so soon for immortal glory.

On these occasions Double Alley, and the other alleys nearby, would disgorge their ragged hordes, and Black Sal and Nobbler Price, the Hooks and all the rest would line the pavement and laugh till they nearly split their sides. Their laughter was not really unkindly and I think the councillor who wrote to the local paper complaining about “the cheap jibes and shallow mirth which travestied a solemn occasion” was talking through his cocked hat. Far from being shallow, the mirth sprang from one of the most ancient and most profound of all the sources of mirth: Dressing up. Deep down at the origins of kingship, deeper still at the dark roots of religion and magic, lies the notion of Fancy Dress: and the idea that Fancy Dress may be the symbol of an office, marking a man out from his fellows by virtue of his putting it on.

Now there is nothing very funny, if you believe in magic, in the Witch Doctor’s mask; or if you believe in religion, in the Cardinal’s hat; or if you believe in monarchy, in the King’s crown; but all would probably seem very funny if you were in the habit of drinking with the witch-doctor or the cardinal or the king in the local pub. In fact, what makes Fancy Dress funny is its incongruity; and it was certain incongruous aspects of the Town Council’s parade that made Double Alley roar with laughter. My uncle, who happened to be a good Mayor, matched his robes very well, and gave them dignity, and got dignity from them; nobody laughed at him when he wore them. But if Councillor X sold you bad fish and ran after the wenches when he was long past the age for such frivolity—if Councillor Y was your slum landlord and so mean that he wouldn’t repair your roof—you couldn’t be blamed for having a good laugh when you saw him shuffling down the street in his robes with a sanctimonious expression on his face and a cocked hat on his head two sizes too big for him.