7
That’s all, really.
I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster, and the chances are that I’ve told you nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you don’t remember, and it’s no use telling you. So far I’ve only spoken about the things that happened to me before I was sixteen. Up to that time things had gone pretty well with the family. It was a bit before my sixteenth birthday that I began to get glimpses of what people call ‘real life’, meaning unpleasantness.
About three days after I’d seen the big carp at Binfield House, Father came in to tea looking very worried and even more grey and mealy than usual. He ate his way solemnly through his tea and didn’t talk much. In those days he had a rather preoccupied way of eating, and his moustache used to work up and down with a sidelong movement, because he hadn’t many back teeth left. I was just getting up from table when he called me back.
‘Wait a minute, George, my boy. I got suthing to say to you. Sit down jest a minute. Mother, you heard what I got to say last night.’
Mother, behind the huge brown teapot, folded her hands in her lap and looked solemn. Father went on, speaking very seriously but rather spoiling the effect by trying to deal with a crumb that lodged somewhere in what was left of his back teeth:
‘George, my boy, I got suthing to say to you. I been thinking it over, and it’s about time you left school. ’Fraid you’ll have to get to work now and start earning a bit to bring home to your mother. I wrote to Mr Wicksey last night and told him as I should have to take you away.’
Of course this was quite according to precedent–his writing to Mr Wicksey before telling me, I mean. Parents in those days, as a matter of course, always arranged everything over their children’s heads.
Father went on to make some rather mumbling and worried explanations. He’d ‘had bad times lately’, things had ‘been a bit difficult’, and the upshot was that Joe and I would have to start earning our living. At that time I didn’t either know or greatly care whether the business was really in a bad way or not. I hadn’t even enough commercial instinct to see the reason why things were ‘difficult’. The fact was that Father had been hit by competition. Sarazins’, the big retail seedsmen who had branches all over the home counties, had stuck a tentacle into Lower Binfield.
Six months earlier they’d taken the lease of a shop in the market-place and dolled it up until what with bright green paint, gilt lettering, gardening tools painted red and green, and huge advertisements for sweet peas, it hit you in the eye at a hundred yards’ distance. Sarazins’, besides selling flower seeds, described themselves as ‘universal poultry and livestock providers’, and apart from wheat and oats and so forth they went in for patent poultry mixtures, bird-seed done up in fancy packets, dog-biscuits of all shapes and colours, medicines, embrocations, and conditioning powders, and branched off into such things as rat-traps, dog-chains, incubators, sanitary eggs, bird-nesting, bulbs, weed-killer, insecticide, and even, in some branches, into what they called a ‘livestock department’, meaning rabbits and day-old chicks.
Father, with his dusty old shop and his refusal to stock new lines, couldn’t compete with that kind of thing and didn’t want to. The tradesmen with their van-horses, and such of the farmers as dealt with the retail seedsmen, fought shy of Sarazins’, but in six months they’d gathered in the petty gentry of the neighbourhood, who in those days had carriages or dogcarts and therefore horses. This meant a big loss of trade for Father and the other corn merchant, Winkle. I didn’t grasp any of this at the time. I had a boy’s attitude towards it all.
I’d never taken any interest in the business. I’d never or hardly ever served in the shop, and when, as occasionally happened, Father wanted me to run an errand or give a hand with something, such as hoisting sacks of grain up to the loft or down again, I’d always dodged it whenever possible. Boys in our class aren’t such complete babies as public schoolboys, they know that work is work and sixpence is sixpence, but it seems natural for a boy to regard his father’s business as a bore. Up till that time fishing-rods, bicycles, fizzy lemonade, and so forth had seemed to me a good deal more real than anything that happened in the grown-up world.
Father had already spoken to old Grimmett, the grocer, who wanted a smart lad and was willing to take me into the shop immediately. Meanwhile Father was going to get rid of the errand boy, and Joe was to come home and help with the shop till he got a regular job. Joe had left school some time back and had been more or less loafing ever since. Father had sometimes talked of ‘getting him into’ the accounts department at the brewery, and earlier had even had thoughts of making him into an auctioneer. Both were completely hopeless because Joe, at seventeen, wrote a hand like a ploughboy and couldn’t repeat the multiplication table. At present he was supposed to be ‘learning the trade’ at a big bicycle shop on the outskirts of Walton.
Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most half-wits, had a slight mechanical turn, but he was quite incapable of working steadily and spent all his time loafing about in greasy overalls, smoking Woodbines, getting into fights, drinking (he’s started that already), getting ‘talked of’ with one girl after another, and sticking Father for money. Father was worried, puzzled, and vaguely resentful. I can see him yet, with the meal on his bald head, and the bit of grey hair over his ears, and his spectacles and his grey moustache. He couldn’t understand what was happening to him. For years his profits had gone up, slowly and steadily, ten pounds this year, twenty pounds that year, and now suddenly they’d gone down with a bump. He couldn’t understand it.
He’d inherited the business from his father, he’d done an honest trade, worked hard, sold sound goods, swindled nobody–and his profits were going down. He said a number of times, between sucking at his teeth to get the crumb out, that times were very bad, trade seemed very slack, he couldn’t think what had come over people, it wasn’t as if the horses didn’t have to eat. Perhaps it was these here motors, he decided finally. ‘Nasty smelly things!’ Mother put in. She was a little worried, and knew that she ought to be more so. Once or twice while Father was talking there was a far-away look in her eyes and I could see her lips moving. She was trying to decide whether it should be a round of beef and carrots tomorrow or another leg of mutton.
Except when there was something in her own line that needed foresight, such as buying linen or saucepans, she wasn’t really capable of thinking beyond tomorrow’s meals. The shop was giving trouble and Father was worried–that was about as far as she saw into it. None of us had any grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and lost money, but was he really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t know what was happening to him, he wasn’t capable of foreseeing that these Sarazin people would systematically under-sell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he? Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man. All he knew was that times were bad, trade was very ‘slack’, very ‘slow’ (he kept repeating these phrases), but probably things would ‘look up presently’.
It would be nice if I could tell you that I was a great help to my father in his time of trouble, suddenly proved myself a man, and developed qualities which no one had suspected in me–and so on and so forth, like the stuff you used to read in the uplift novels of thirty years ago. Or alternatively I’d like to be able to record that I bitterly resented having to leave school, my eager young mind, yearning for knowledge and refinement, recoiled from the soulless mechanical job into which they were thrusting me–and so on and so forth, like the stuff you read in the uplift novels today.
Both would be complete bunkum. The truth is that I was pleased and excited at the idea of going to work, especially when I grasped that Old Grimmett was going to pay me real wages, twelve shillings a week, of which I could keep four for myself. The big carp at Binfield House, which had filled my mind for three days past, faded right out of it. I’d no objection to leaving school a few terms early. It generally happened the same way with boys at our school. A boy was always ‘going to’
