A Man of Parts (7 page)

Anthony continues to live at Mr Mumford’s because Kitty, understandably, is unwilling to have him back in the matrimonial home at once, and requests an interval for reflection. Anthony tells Rebecca, when she visits him one day, that he is hopeful they will get together again in due course. Rebecca is relieved, and makes a kind of peace with Anthony. H.G. is pleased not to have to concern himself with the matter any longer. He wants to think about his life, free from distraction.

As the year wanes, as the air becomes colder and the blackout plunges London into pre-industrial gloom at an earlier and earlier hour, the revived energy he felt in the summer begins to fade. He becomes more withdrawn, living inside his own head. The other people in the house, the nurses, the cook-housekeeper, the woman who comes in daily to clean, and his small family entourage of Marjorie, Gip and Anthony, observe him slumped in his armchair in the small sitting room, staring into space, muttering to himself, or sitting at his desk in the study, turning over papers, getting up occasionally to take down a book from the shelves, or rummaging for letters and photographs in drawers and filing cabinets. They do not know what is going on in his head. The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now. His mind is at the end of its tether, he cannot bear to look forward into the chaos ahead. He looks back, at his life: has it, taken all in all, been a story of success or failure? In trying to answer this question it is useful to have a second voice. He can, for instance, interview himself about his past, lobbing easy questions and answering them expansively, as he used to do in the days when journalists were still interested.

– So when and where were you born?

– On the 21st of September, 1866, at Atlas House, in Bromley High Street – an undistinguished place, Bromley, halfway between a town and village, about ten miles south of London and soon to be swallowed up by it. ‘Atlas House’ was the ridiculously pretentious name of a china shop, a chronically unprofitable business which my parents were conned into taking over from a relative. Neither of them had any aptitude for commerce. My mother had been a lady’s maid in a great house before she married, and my father an under-gardener on the same estate. He was also a very good cricketer – turned professional and played for Kent after they married. That brought in some additional income, and he sold cricket gear from the shop, but not very profitably. Who would think of going to a china shop to buy a cricket bat?

– What’s your earliest memory?

– Looking up through the barred window of our kitchen at the feet of people going past on the pavement. We lived above and behind the shop and the house was built on a slope, so our kitchen and scullery were below ground level. The whole house was dark, cramped and insanitary. There was a dangerously steep staircase that led from the back parlour down to the kitchen and the scullery, which had a single pump-driven cold tap. There was an open gutter in the yard where the domestic waste water soaked away into a cesspit under the outdoor jakes, just a few yards from the well that provided fresh water for the pump.

– But by the age of thirty-four you had done well enough to build your own spacious house overlooking the sea at Sandgate, near Folkestone, designed by a distinguished architect—

– And by me as well. It was the first private house in the country in which every bedroom had its own lavatory attached. That was my idea, and I had to fight Voysey every inch of the way to get it. But without the experience of growing up in that jerry-built horror on Bromley High Street, I probably wouldn’t have had the vision to build Spade House. It gave me a lifelong obsession with domestic architecture, and a hatred of the badly designed houses which spread all over suburban England in the late nineteenth century like some kind of brick-and-mortar leprosy. My poor mother wore herself out trying to keep Atlas House clean and decent, but she hadn’t a chance. There were vermin behind the wallpaper and in the furniture – you could squash them if you saw them, but you could never get rid of them.

– So, growing up in poverty—

– It wasn’t real poverty. We never starved, but we had a poor diet, which stunted my growth, and made me susceptible to illness. We never went barefoot – but we wore ill-fitting boots and shoes. It was a kind of genteel poverty. I was never allowed to bring my friends home to play because they would see that we couldn’t afford a servant, not even the humblest skivvy, and the word would get round the neighbourhood. My parents scrimped and saved so they could send me to the cheapest kind of private school, and avoid the shame of a board school, where I might have had better-trained teachers.

– Were you aware that you had talents which were being stifled by this environment?

– Dimly. I discovered from books that there was a more exciting, fulfilling world elsewhere, but I despaired of ever getting access to it.

– What would you say was the lowest point in your life at that time?

– Well, there are a lot to choose from … But I think it was my first day at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, the day I arrived to begin my second apprenticeship. I was fifteen. I’d left school at fourteen, because my parents couldn’t afford to go on paying the fees even though Bromley Academy’s were as low as they came. When I was about eleven my father had an accident and broke his leg, which put a full stop to his cricketing career, so money was very short after that. My mother was set on making me into a draper, like my two older brothers, but I behaved so badly in my first apprenticeship, at Windsor, that I was fired after a few months. By this time my mother had returned to Up Park, the big country house near Midhurst in West Sussex where she’d been a maidservant before she was married. She was offered the job of housekeeper, which was an unexpected stroke of luck for her, and she was able to accommodate me there for a while. I had a trial as apprentice to a chemist in the town of Midhurst, which I found more congenial than drapery, but my mother couldn’t afford the higher premium, so it didn’t last long. Long enough, though, for me to be sent to Midhurst Grammar School for a few private lessons in Latin from the headmaster – just so I could read prescriptions and the labels on the bottles – and when the family at Up Park got restive about my continuing presence my mother boarded me at the school as a pupil for some weeks while she looked for another draper’s apprenticeship for me. She had a faith in that branch of retail trade that was almost religious. But I’d had a taste of something resembling real education at Midhurst Grammar, and I’d discovered the library at Up Park, a wonderful place, with cliffs of books so high you had to scale them with a moveable ladder, books like
Gulliver’s Travels
and Plato’s
Republic
. In the attic next to my bedroom I found the components of an old reflecting telescope which I managed to put together, and mounted at my bedroom window to look at the craters of the moon – perhaps
The First Men in the Moon
had its genesis there. The family that owned Up Park made little use of their library and none at all of the telescope, but the glimpses I had of their civilised, leisured existence excited my adolescent mind and opened up all kinds of horizons previously hidden from me. I didn’t know what I wanted from life exactly, or what I could achieve, but I knew it had to be something more fulfilling than working in a shop … Where was I?

– Your second draper’s apprenticeship
.

– Yes. That’s why my first day was so depressing – because it
was
the second one. I remember taking my valise up to the dreary dormitory where the apprentices and junior assistants slept, its eight iron beds and four wash-hand stands with chipped enamel basins lined up on the bare floorboards, waiting for someone to come and show me over the premises and knowing in advance what they would be like – the windowless basement dining room illuminated by naked gas jets, its walls damp with condensation and the smell of the previous night’s cabbage still lingering in the air, where I would have a bread-and-butter breakfast at half-past eight in the morning after working for an hour getting the shop ready for opening time, and where I would return for my dinner after a long day of humping bales of cloth and kowtowing to toffee-nosed customers and being ordered about by the senior shopwalkers. ‘
Forward, Wells!
’ That’s what they used to bark when they wanted you for something … The dormitory windows overlooked a narrow featureless cul-de-sac that resembled a prison yard, and peering down at it I felt like an old lag returning to serve a second sentence – a four-year sentence, because my mother had paid nearly the whole premium in advance. That was my lowest moment.

– And what would you say was the most important turning point in your life?

– Getting out of there. The place was exactly as I had feared. If you’ve read my novel
Kipps
you’ll know what it was like. Wage-slavery, made all the worse somehow – worse than a factory or a mine, where the manners would be as rough as the work – by the fact that the nature of the trade required us to mimic the gentility of our customers. I was suffocating in an atmosphere of false gentility and petty cash – what a redolent phrase that is,
petty cash
! Everything was petty in that world – the ideas, the conversations, the flirtations, the ambitions. It was as if the eternal verities were measured out and cut up in yards and inches, and their price calculated down to the last three-farthings. Anything but the most proper behaviour, not only in working hours, but in our meagre spare time, could cause instant dismissal. The fear of losing your ‘crib’ as it was called, and falling into the abyss of poverty, hung over the shop assistants as well as the apprentices – over everybody except the Boss, and very few had any hope of becoming a boss themselves. There’s a gloomy character in the novel called Minton, a senior apprentice, who says to Kipps, ‘
I tell you we’re in a blessed drainpipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die
.’ That was taken from life, only the chap who said it to me called it a ‘bloody drainpipe’. I stuck it for two years, but by then I’d had enough … I knew the only way out of the drainpipe was through education. I was clever, but I wasn’t educated. I thought wistfully of my brief time at Midhurst Grammar and I knew there were persons called ushers, who acted as teachers to younger pupils while receiving some tuition themselves. So I wrote to the headmaster, a man called Byatt, and asked if he would take me on in that capacity. Now Byatt knew I was clever because he had coached me in Latin and I’d astonished him by learning more Latin in five weeks than most of his beginners managed in a year. He thought I could be useful to him, so he offered to take me on as a student-teacher, without pay, but with board and lodging provided. One Sunday, my day off work, I walked the seventeen miles to Up Park, and told my mother what I wanted to do. Of course she resisted the idea. She wept and argued and pleaded with me to give the drapery apprenticeship ‘one more try’. I don’t think it was the thought of losing the premium that worried her most – it was the uncertainty of an unqualified teacher’s future, and above all my apostasy from the retail trade in drapery.

– What about your father? What did he say?

– He was furious at the prospect of my forfeiting the premium, but his opinion didn’t really matter. He lived alone in Atlas House after my mother went back to Up Park, making a pretence of running the shop until it was finally declared insolvent. He was a broken man really, after the accident – cricket was all he lived for, and he’d been good at it. He’s the only player who ever clean-bowled four batsmen with successive balls in first-class cricket. You’ll find it in Wisden. But my mother was always the dominant partner in the marriage, and she made all the decisions. Legally I was still a child, and Byatt couldn’t take me on without her agreement. I had to return to Southsea that Sunday evening, but I told her that if she wouldn’t let me go to Midhurst I would kill myself.

– Did you mean it?

– I believe I did. I’d thought a lot about suicide in Southsea, and what would be the best method: drowning, I decided. It was the only other way out of the drainpipe, as far as I could see. My mother could tell I was serious, and it shook her. As a pious Low Church Anglican she regarded suicide as the unforgivable sin, whereas I had no such scruples – I’d never had much faith in the Christian God, even as a child, and I lost it completely when I was about fifteen.

– For any particular reason?

– I used to go to different churches in Portsmouth on a Sunday, to sample the various services, and one day I went into the Catholic cathedral and heard a sermon on Hell given by some Monsignor in a long skirt which disgusted me – it was just sadistic, designed to fill people with terror – you know the sermon in Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
? It was like that. I gave Joyce’s book a good review many years later – it brought back that Sunday morning in Portsmouth cathedral so vividly. That was when I shed what little religious faith I still had. I used to scare the other apprentices by making atheistical remarks in the dormitory and challenging the Deity to strike me dead with a thunderbolt if He existed.