Three Men in a Boat (4 page)

When World War I broke out, Jerome found himself torn between his dislike of German militarism and his fondness for the Germans themselves. He recalled seeing German officers strutting three abreast down the street, ‘insolent, conceited, overbearing, civilians compelled everywhere to cringe before them’, but he hated the wave of Germanophobia that swept the country in 1914, bearing dachshunds and mild-mannered German waiters in its wake, and distrusted atrocity stories about bayonetted babies and ravished Belgian nuns. He longed to enlist, and see something of combat for himself. Too old for the British army, he wangled his way into the French ambulance service at the age of fifty-six. Helping wounded men behind the front line at Verdun, amid the rain and the rats and the rotting corpses, he was sickened by what he saw, and filled with rage against the politicians whom he held responsible. He also ran a hospital for wounded animals, among them a donkey recently
awarded the Croix de Guerre. Back in England, he joined Philip Snowden, Dean Inge, E. D. Morel and John Drinkwater in campaigning for a negotiated settlement to the war.

Jerome died of a stroke in 1927, not long after being given the freedom of Walsall. The ‘boat of life’ had run out to sea at last, and how better to leave him than with the concluding words of
Three Men on the Bummel
, redolent as they are of Jerome the companionable, pipe-smoking amateur philosopher? Our thoughts, he wrote, ‘are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ’tis over.’

Jeremy Lewis

1
. Autobiographical quotations are from
My Life and Times
, published in 1926.

2
. ‘Bummel’ is also German for a ‘stroll’. As befitted Jerome’s pose as an indolent man of leisure, a ‘Bummler’ is an ‘idler’ or a ‘loafer’.

3
. Written by George Grossmith (1847–1912) and his brother Weedon (1854–1919), who also provided the illustrations,
The Diary of a Nobody
relatesthemisadventuresofaself-importantbutineffectualclerkwhoisdeferential in the office and regularly humiliated on the home front. Originally serialized in
Punch
, it was published in book form by Arrowsmith in 1892.

4
. Comic verses written and illustrated by Jerome’s friend W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911): the first volume appeared in 1869, and a second followed four years later.

5
. The supreme achievement of P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975); published in 1910, it is a masterly exposé of office life, and features the tyrannical bank manager Mr Bickersdyke.

6
. John Foxe (1516–87) was a Protestant propagandist. His
Book of Martyrs
, published in 1563, left the English with an abiding suspicion of Roman Catholics and their ways.

7
. Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) was a civil servant who wrote realistic novels about life in the East End slums.
A Child of the Jago
was published
in 1896: his other novels include
Tales of Mean Streets
(1894) and
The Hole in the Wall
(1902).

8
. Robert Tressell was the pen-name of Robert Noonan (
c
. 1870–1911), a Liverpudlian house-painter.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
was published posthumously, in 1914: it is set in Hastings, but the scenes it describes would have been all too familiar to East End dwellers.

9
. Like Jerome, George Gissing (1857–1903) had experience of life at its seamiest and most destitute: in
New Grub Street
he described the existence of impoverished hack-writers, eking out a livelihood in ways familiar to the youthful Jerome.

10
. Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922) was the prototypical Press baron. He founded what was to become the Amalgamated Press in 1887: he took over the
Evening News
in 1894, and among his journalistic creations were
Answers
(1888), the
Daily Mail
(1896) and the
Daily Mirror
(1903). In due course he became Lord Northcliffe.

11
. George Newnes (1851–1910) was an influential and successful newspaper and magazine proprietor. He founded
Tit-Bits
(1881) and the
Strand Magazine
, where many of the Sherlock Holmes stories first appeared in print.

12
. Charles Mudie (1818–90) opened his Lending Library in Oxford Street in 1852. His name is forever associated with the long ‘three-decker’ novels beloved of the mid-Victorians; like W. H. Smith, he is believed to have exercised a degree of informal censorship via his disapproval of anything remotely
risqué
or immoral.

13
. W. H. Smith (1825–91) opened his first railway bookstall on Euston Station in 1848: the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers in 1855 enabled him to sell cheap newspapers as well as books, and before long his shops were doing brisk business on railway stations up and down the country. Known as ‘Old Morality’, he shared Mudie’s views about the desirability of wholesome reading; but he encouraged publishers to abandon the three-decker novel in favour of single-volume works, which took up less shelf-space and could more easily be read on trains. Later in life he took to politics, and as First Lord of the Admiralty he was mocked by W. S. Gilbert in
The Pirates of Penzance
(‘Stick to your desk and never go to sea, / And you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee’: for Harris’s rendition, see p.
62
).

14
. The embattled hero of H. G. Wells’s
The History of Mr Polly
(1910): he was, in fact, a shop assistant, but has much in common with the perkier kind of late-Victorian and Edwardian clerk.

15
. Mr Pooter’s disrespectful son; he too works as a clerk, but unlike his
father he refuses to be got down by life or by the grandeur of those set above him.

16
. J. M. Barrie (1860–1937) is best-known as the creator of Peter Pan; his other plays included
The Admirable Crichton
(1902) and
Dear Brutus
(1917).

17
. See ‘The Tin-Openers’ in
Complete Essays
by V. S. Pritchett (Chatto & Windus, 1991).

18
. W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was born and grew up in Wapping, and many of his short stories are set in the East End docks.

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. Its pages form the record of events that really happened. All that has been done is to colour them; and, for this, no extra charge has been made. George and Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals, but things of flesh and blood – especially George, who weighs about twelve stone. Other works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature: other books may rival it in originality and size; but, for hopeless and incurable veracity, nothing yet discovered can surpass it. This, more than all its other charms, will, it is felt, make the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader; and will lend additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches.

London
,

August 1889

Three Invalids – Sufferings of George and Harris – A victim to one hundred and seven fatal maladies – Useful prescriptions – Cure for liver complaint in children – We agree that we are overworked, and need rest– A week on the rolling deep? – George suggests the river – Montmorency lodges an objection – Original motion carried by majority of three to one
.

There were four of us – George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were – bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that
he
had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what
he
was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with, in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of ‘premonitory symptoms’, it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for a while frozen with horror; and then in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St Vitus’s Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need ‘to walk the hospitals’, if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist
up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I walked into that reading-room a happy healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. ‘What a doctor wants’, I said, ‘is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.’ So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:

‘Well, what’s the matter with you?’

I said:

‘I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is
not
the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I
have
got.’