1904

Three months more in the deliberate and frequent attempt to bring new life into the world yielded still no fruit. Mrs. Crumb said that she had known women take years and years and then, one day, to pop out a perfectly healthy little boy or girl, as if delivered by the angels.

The elder Mrs Crumb, who had visited for tea in the company of Great-Aunt Sophie, but not Aunt Bess (who was dotty), Florence (who was looking after Aunt Bess in the absence of her mother), or Polly (who had taken to service like an angry duck to a turbulent pond but seemed to be sticking in her current position and did not have her day off on that day), agreed with her daughter-in-law.

"The Lord brings issue when the time is best," Great-Aunt Sophie nodded.

When they had gone home and the maid was out slopping-out, the master of the tiny house said to his wife, "But what if there’s something wrong with one of us?" and could not be dissuaded from fretting.

Vexed both by this thought and by his mother’s weekly repeated questions about when precisely her son would become a father, Crumb took himself to see a doctor in town. He preferred to avoid Ilkley on the understanding that the Hippocratic Oath had as much meaning in a small town as any other oath, and that whatever he said would find its way back to every set of ears in the place.

The doctor in question was ruddy and fair, and so corpulent that he was often called upon to treat himself for disorders of the digestion.

He subjected Crumb to what Crumb considered to be a humiliating examination, costing an arm and a leg and involving the inspection of neither. The doctor was dismissive.

"Nothing whatsoever the matter with that," he said, putting away the instruments of his trade which, Crumb was unsettled to note, were not absolutely different from Morgan’s surveying equipment. "Your lungs, those I would call into question, my lad. You’ve a conspicuously narrow ribcage and I shouldn’t like to be your lung at all, sir, no I should not. But the gentleman downstairs, for whom you come to me? In fine condition! Rarely does one see a membrium virilis in such good health in this business. Nothing the matter there." He removed a sheet of paper from his blotting-pad, and added with a self-conscious smile, "And your orchids, in as much as one can ever tell, are bloomin’ marvellous. Perhaps," the doctor suggested, as he wrote out his bill with practiced ease and a horn-encased fountain pen, "you’re being a little premature in your panic, hey? It is early days yet, you’re not even, what, mm, twenty-two?"

It is necessary for me to take us all back in time a little from April 1904, during which Crumb had his manhood catalogued by a man who looked like a pork balloon, to give an account of the tribulations of a young would-be radical in Hitchin.