Portrait of Elmbury (19 page)

Poor Mr. Brunswick, naturally, was very upset indeed. From the dark doorway of his dingy little shop he watched and brooded. The windows of the new store were filled with cheap lines at cut
prices and Mr. Brunswick, who like the people of Double Alley had his peculiar pride, didn't deal in cheap lines nor pretend to cut his prices. But he saw his late customers flocking into the store. Perhaps these fickle ones would come back to his shop when the shoddy things wore out; but meanwhile he was helpless, he could neither outbuy the opposition nor out-advertise it, his whole capital was a mere three hundred pounds matched against the Chain Stores' millions.

So Mr. Brunswick shrugged his shoulders and went down the street to Mr. Parfitt's furniture shop and persuaded Mr. Parfitt to write him, in Gothic lettering, a new sign. Mr. Brunswick didn't know any Latin; but he had an original sense of humour; for the new sign, hung over his shop next day, declared defiantly:

MEN'S AND WOMEN'S SANA IN CORPORE SANO.

The great plutocrat who owned the Chain Stores might quote that, if he liked, as an example of the ignorance and stupidity of his rivals the country tradesmen. He was welcome to dine out on the story if it amused him; for Elmbury humour is not for strangers and certainly not for such strangers as he.

At last I said good-night to Mr. Chorlton and walked home through the crooked streets between the crooked, crazy houses. Out of the dark entrance to an alley a long spidery figure came sidling up to me and I recognised Ancient Pistol. He touched his cap and said he was pleased to see me again. I gave him a shilling. He leaned conspiratorially towards me and asked if I would like a salmon. If so I must take a walk down Gander Lane after dark to-morrow night and I should find it in the ditch on the left-hand side just by the stile into Margaret's Meadow. It would be covered with dead leaves. I could settle up later. … Pistol touched his cap again and vanished into the shadows.

My way home was punctuated by encounters with old friends,
and by fragments of local gossip and local politics which, because I had been so long away, I only half-understood. It seemed that there was a great row going on between the Operatic Society and the Dramatic Society which until recently had been one. The Opera tics were Lowbrows who wanted Gilbert and Sullivan; the Dramatics were Highbrow who wanted Shaw; and both wanted (at the same time it seemed) the same stage, the same scenery, the same stage manager and the same leading lady. There was another fine row going on in the Council; it was very obscure and it was something to do with the appointment of a rat-catcher. Bardolph had been sent to prison for stealing the bicycle of the police-constable who came to arrest him for some other offence. There was fierce controversy about the Abbey services, which some deemed too High and others too Low. The whole Committee of the local Farmers' Union, partaking of a drink called Plum Jerkum to fortify themselves against hecklers at their annual meeting, had appeared scandalously drunk upon the platform. And Mr. Parfitt was in trouble over the sale of Indecent Literature: he had printed picture postcards of the Long Man.

And so on. It occurred to me that Elmbury was still a very lively and vigorous place; and when I recollected that one of my London friends had professed himself shocked at my intention “to bury myself in a dead-alive country town” I nearly laughed out loud. This particular friend belonged to a school of writers which had its headquarters in Bloomsbury and prided itself on being very unconventional and free. Its adherents were always talking about “the sacred right of self-expression,” which served as a jolly good excuse for seducing your neighbour's wife or breaking up the furniture when you were drunk. Yet it seemed to me that they didn't know how to express themselves half as well as a great many of the Elmbury people did. Compared with some of our folks, they were positively hidebound; they were as conventional as the heroes and heroines of their novels, who always talked in the same conventional idiom at the same conventional cocktail parties. And as for Elmbury being dead, why, the guests at those cocktail parties were very shades compared
with the full-blooded exuberant company at the Shakespeare or the Swan.

In fact, by comparison with Elmbury people, those daring intellectuals seemed rather colourless and dull. Their outlook seemed curiously limited. I wouldn't have hurt their feelings by telling them so, but they seemed to me to have a small-town mentality, somehow.

And so, as I walked home through the fantastic populous streets of Elmbury on that first night of my homecoming, I did not feel that I had exchanged a great world for a little one: I felt exactly the opposite.

Emotion seemed larger here, pleasures were keener, sorrows sharper, men's laughter was more boisterous, jokes were funnier, the tragedy was more profound and the comedy more riotous, the huge fantasy of life was altogether more fantastic. London, for all its street lights, was a twilit world; Elmbury, on a murky February evening, seemed as bright as a stage.

It was a bright world, yes: but the glow which lights Elmbury in my memory shows up also the dark shadows. That was 1931, during which western civilisation demonstrated for the first time that it could contrive a peace which was, for most of its citizens, nearly as uncomfortable as war. The storm which Mr. Jeffs had sniffed in the balmy air four years ago had broken with a vengeance now. Already Elmbury had more than three hundred unemployed.

It was the first thing I noticed when I walked down the High Street by day; the crowd of idle men standing at the Cross. Of course there had always been men at the street corners in Elmbury; but only a few and these the familiar ones, such as Pistol, Bardolph and Nym. Those had a purpose in standing about; they were on the look-out for whatever they could scrounge. Others of their kidney would often hang about deliberately on the chance of picking-up an “odd-job”; and if we wanted the
garden tidied up, or extra help in the market, we would always send somebody to the Cross to find a man who wanted a job.

These hangers-about had been purposeful, they had had a very good reason for standing at the Cross, but now Elmbury saw something which it had never seen before, something very grim and terrible and shocking, it saw men loafing about
purposelessly
, men who had long ago given up the hope of finding a job but who stood at the street-corner out of habit, or perhaps because it was slightly more interesting, and not much colder, than sitting in their own house.

You could find a score any morning at the Cross; another little group outside the Anchor Inn; a third at the end of the town where the road bridge crosses the river. On Fridays the queue outside the Labour Exchange stretched for nearly a hundred yards down Church Street.

Most of the men were young, many were in their 'teens. The majority of the older men with regular jobs were still in employment. Elmbury was luckier in that respect than many another small town. Its own little industries—flour-milling, malting, boat-building—were not greatly affected by the depression and were able to carry on; and agriculture, though severely hit, could not cut down its labour beyond a certain indispensable minimum. Cows must be milked, stock reared, fields ploughed, and crops harvested, even though these operations resulted in a loss. The colliery and the factory could close down; but not the farm.

The bitter consequences of the depression, therefore, fell first upon the casual labourers and the semi-skilled odd-jobbers, of which Elmbury had a great number; and next upon the lads who had never had a job at all. Many of these boys, in normal times, would have gone away to learn a trade, the more adventurous would probably drift to the cities and would either remain there—adding good country stock to the urban populations—or return in due course to their home town bringing back new ideas and new ways to Elmbury. Both city and country town reaped benefits from this migration of labour. But now the cities had no jobs to offer. They themselves had an unemployment problem,
not of hundreds, but of tens of thousands; and so our young men at the very time when they should have been learning a trade lost heart and hope at the street corner.

The casual labourer and the handyman, the odd-jobbers who could turn their hands to anything from making a rabbit hutch to picking plums, sprouts, or peas, from gardening to hay-trussing, from thatching to salmon-netting, now spent their days with the youths lounging on the pavement. Plums last season had fetched less than the cost of sending them by rail to Manchester; sprouts at a shilling a pot were best left to rot on the stalks; there was no sale for hay, and no job for the hay-trusser.

This was a local disaster, for the popular notion that the casual labourer doesn't matter (or at best is unimportant by comparison with the man in regular work) is a very mistaken notion. In Elmbury at any rate the class of odd-job-man included some of the best elements in the community. These were the men with independent spirits who would bind themselves to no master. “Better be a free man than have a full belly twice a day,” one of them said to me once. These were the adventurous and the imaginative men, whose restless minds and ingenious hands would scorn to perform the same set task day in, day out, through the long years. These were the Jacks-of-all-trades. They might perhaps be masters of none; but they were the last free men in Elmbury.

England has always been lucky in her possession of such a class, bound to no trade and no employer, handy at many things, quick to learn, experimental and adventurous. When the agents of Drake and Raleigh looked for men for a voyage to the Americas it was among this class, I'll wager, that they first sought. It was not the men in regular jobs who'd leave hearth and home and the certainty of a weekly wage to follow a romantic captain to the ends of the earth. And it was this class too, the unstable and the adventurous, which gave the first volunteers to all our wars.
The odd-job man makes a good soldier. He learns quickly to handle weapons as he has often learned to handle new tools. He is not set in his ways like the regular worker; he has a mind more easily moulded to the event. And best of all, he doesn't look to the future; the future, for him, has always looked after itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof is his watchword; and it serves for a soldier's watchword very well indeed.

However, these admirable men were the first to go to the wall when that strange, disastrous dislocation of trade and finance happened in 1931: they, and the young men, equally adventurous, who had not yet started to learn a trade. These two classes, containing some of the best of our manhood, were thrown upon the rubbish-heap. In many places, of course, the skilled and regular workers were affected as well; but in Elmbury it was chiefly a problem of the youths and the casual labourers: about 150 youths, about 200 “odd-jobbers,” for whom there was no work and no likelihood of work until this catastrophe of peace was solved by the catastrophe of war.

The Town Council did what it could. It published a most expensive brochure with the idea of persuading people to spend their holidays in “unspoilt Elmbury”; and another expensive brochure for the purpose of persuading manufacturers to come and spoil it. But this ingenuous attempt to make the best of both worlds was doomed to failure. Money seemed to have dried up at its mysterious source. There were few visitors, and they had little to spend. Nobody contemplated building factories at such a time and if they had done so would have been unlikely to choose a site so far from coal, ports, or railway-junctions.

“I will give you work,” was the easily-made, easily-broken promise of every candidate at the Council elections. Any ill-paid drudgery, in 1931, seemed utterly desirable. A man deemed himself fortunate indeed if he were taken on by a farmer to dig ditches at thirty shillings a week. And this, I think, was one of the worst aspects of the tragedy as far as Elmbury was concerned. Our people, who by lucky chance had escaped the defiling touch of Victorian industrialism, were now driven to accept the horrible heresies of Victorian industrialism, that the giving of work was
a favour, that the doing of work was a virtue
per se
. While there was plenty of casual work to be had, the men of Elmbury had always been free to choose what work they should do and whom they should work for: for they could always go and pick sprouts or plums, fell timber or make hay. And because they had been able to do the work of their own choice, they had generally taken pleasure and pride in it. Now all that was changed. The industrial heresy, beloved of great capitalists, bemused even the rugged independent spirits of Elmbury. Hard and uninteresting work was something rare, desirable, and of itself virtuous. The man who had the privilege of working long hours at a dull job was a better man than his neighbour who worked as little as he need. The man who had work to offer was necessarily a good citizen; the man who refused a job because it was uninteresting was wicked—or mad. You didn't look for interest or pleasure in your work; the virtue lay in the doing of the work for the appointed number of hours, whether it was ill done or well done; in serving humbly and blindly the great capitalist god.

Thus the blight settled on men's minds during the depression. The gay, happy-go-lucky fellows who would do six different jobs on six different days, do them well, and enjoy doing them—and then, feeling prosperous, take three days off to go fishing—these men weren't wanted any more. They must toe the line, join the queue, think themselves lucky if they were found worthy to serve the god.

So the skill of the handyman went to waste at the street corner; so the adventurous spirit was lost and the happy-go-lucky mood turned sour. The odd-job men and the pale-faced youths stood together at Elmbury Cross, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped, coat collars turned up against the cold wind. Our best manhood rotted alongside our best youth.

We should need them both in 1940.