As I have explained, Wash Common is a plateau south of Newbury, between the Kennet and the little Enborne brook. We lived at the north end of the plateau, at the top of Wash Hill. The Newbury-Andover road runs across the plateau and drops down the other side — known as Sandpit Hill — to the Enborne crossing called Wash Water. This was the first stream I ever knew; and here my father used to take me to paddle. It was - and still is - as pretty a brook as could be imagined, in places roofed over with alder in summer, all the air heavy with the scent of meadowsweet, the shallows full of blue brooklime. I remember big, green dragonflies hovering and darting over the water. (I suppose now that they were Calopteryx splendens.) The bed is mostly clean gravel, and to paddle I used to wear slip-on rubber sand-shoes. I felt full of excitement as I rather gingerly stepped into the water, pushing my way through the purple loosestrife and great willow-herb, step by step until I was in the middle of the shady stream, which is about eight feet wide and two or three feet deep (if as much). My father, a little way off, strolled about the bank, pretending inattention. I stood for a while, listening to the noise of the water, and then began slowly paddling downstream. After a few yards I entered the tunnel of alders, so thick that the bank on either side became invisible. I startled a fish - a dace, I expect - and watched it shoot away, disappearing into brown gloom. As I went on, until the mouth of the alder tunnel seemed a long way behind, the water became deeper, until it was over my waist. I called out to my father, who answered quietly and reassuringly from somewhere outside the screen of trees.
At length I emerged into the open and stopped for a minute or two to recover myself, hanging on to a plant of ragwort growing on the further bank. (I already knew that my full weight wasn’t going to pull that up.) Then I waded on in bright sunshine, following the stream round a bend to the left. And here I came to an unforeseeable marvel. Suddenly I found bricks under my feet and passed under a big, square, rusty iron-bound beam. On either side rose walls of old, crumbling brick. I was among the ruins of a long-abandoned mill, from which the brook, with a little, splashing fall, dropped into a wide, deep pool. My father’s composed voice called ‘Shouldn’t go any further, my boy, I think.’ I felt I had gone further alone than ever in my life, and experienced a venture I could never have imagined.
It’s all there still, for the time being unchanged. The distance I paddled is about sixty yards.
About a mile to the east of our house lay the public open space of Greenham Common, and here, too, my father would take me to wander and explore. In those days, believe it or not, Greenham was a big, lonely place, a gravelly, heathery waste three miles long and a mile wide. We would leave the car and stray off into this wilderness. Our ostensible purpose was to pick heather — not ling, but purple bell heather (Erica cinerea). However, anything was liable to happen. I might become fascinated by an anthill, and lie prone for ten minutes or more, watching the ants dragging their burdens — twigs, leaves, dead insects. I remember the first time I came, in a marshy place, upon sundews (Drosera rotundifolia), each with its tall stem of little, white flowers rising from the centre of the ring of orange, crinite, droplet-covered leaves. My father showed me how these plants attracted and closed upon tiny flies and insects. I felt sorry for the flies and wanted to try to release them, but this he deprecated. ‘It’s nature, my boy. If you don’t like it, come on.’
I saw my first stoat on Greenham Common; and it saw me. My father was some little way off and I was lying on my stomach, watching a spider spinning a web in the bracken. The stoat appeared suddenly out of the heather, about fourteen or fifteen feet away. From pictures in books I knew what it must be, but I was startled by the richness of its colouring - the chestnut back and cream-yellow breast and belly. The stoat was also startled. It remained quite still, its back slightly arched, staring at me for several seconds. Then, apparently less alarmed than with an air of deciding to let well alone, it turned and trotted away.
In those days, grass snakes and slow worms were by no means rare on Greenham Common. They were however, very shy. If you came upon one basking, it would be off in a flash into the heather. No doubt there were adders, too, although I can’t remember to have seen one. My father certainly wasn’t worried about them. What I did see, one day - and it’s the only time - was a smooth snake. It was not in the open, but among the heather. I think it must have been injured in some way - although I don’t recall seeing any injury — because its attempts to be off were not very effectual. I could tell that it wasn’t a grass snake: it was lighter in colour, with dark spots along the top of its back. (A grass snake’s spots - or bars - are along the sides.) As I’d never seen an adder I thought it must be one, and ran back to tell my father, but when we both returned to the place, the snake had, of course, gone. It may, I suppose, have been an adder after all, but all I can say is that I got a very good look at it and I’m satisfied in my own mind that it was a smooth snake. The reason why I am writing thus carefully is that smooth snakes, whatever their habitat and numerosity sixty years ago, are now very rare. (See, e.g., The Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Animals of Britain.) The reason, as for most declining creatures all over the world, is destruction of natural habitat. Smooth snakes frequent - or used to frequent - lowland heath in the south country. During the past half-century, more and more of this unproductive heath has been ‘taken in’ by agriculture. As for Greenham Common, when one reflects what’s happened to that, my childhood encounter with the smooth snake might be taken almost as a morality tale. Why can’t Greenham Common now be restored as a public open space?
For several childhood summers my principal motive for going there was to catch grasshoppers. I wanted to colonize the paddock at home, which had none, although there was a fine colony of crickets (Wood Crickets, I rather think: Nemobius sylvestris) occupying a dense, round, yellow-leaved holly bush growing between the paddock and the Wild Wood. Grasshoppers abounded on Greenham Common. On a hot summer’s day the sound of their zipping was everywhere, and as you walked through the heather they would leap away, gliding for yards in curving flight. I used to like to get up close to one and watch it stridulating, but you had to be stealthy, for they were easily alarmed. Since no less a work than Michael Chinery’s Field Guide to the Insects of Britain and Northern Europe speaks of the stridulation as ‘song’, perhaps I may be acquitted of sentimentality when I say that I still love to listen to them. As a little boy, I sometimes wondered whether it mightn’t be possible to put together a sort of grasshopper band, for I had noticed that the songs differed in pitch, while seeming to remain in harmony. I can’t do better here than to quote Michael Chinery:
‘The “song” of these insects is undoubtedly the most fascinating thing about them. It is produced by a process called stridulation, which involves the rubbing of one part of the body (the “file”) over another part (the “scraper”). The file is provided with a series of pegs or ridges that strike the scraper in turn and set up vibrations. You can imitate the action by drawing a comb over the edge of a card. The scraper is always on the wing but the file may be on the leg (grasshoppers) or on the opposite wing (crickets).
‘The complete passage of the file over the scraper is usually very rapid and produces a short pulse of sound. Strictly speaking there are several pulses, one for each peg as it strikes the scraper, but these small pulses follow each other so rapidly that we can regard each passage of the file as producing a single pulse. This is the basic “song-producing” mechanism in all the stridulators, but the pattern of the song varies enormously. The pulses come in bursts, or chirps, of varying duration, caused by repeated passage of the file over the scraper. The Common Green Grasshopper, Omocestus viridulus, produces a continuous chirp for twenty seconds or more and the whole body quivers as the legs move up and down as much as twenty times a second. Very different is the song of the Common Field Grasshopper, Chorthippus brunneus, which produces a series of 6-10 half-second chirps, spread evenly over about twelve seconds. All of our grasshoppers have a fairly fixed song length at a given temperature and the song is repeated at irregular intervals. The crickets, however, have no such fixed song length and in warm weather they chirp indefinitely. Most of our stridulators are quiet in cool weather.
‘Volume and pitch also vary from species to species and one can liken the various songs, when amplified, to the sounds of motor mowers, sewing machines, motor cycles and so on. In fact, it is usually easier to identify grasshoppers, in which there is a great colour variation, by their songs than by their appearances.’
There were several kinds of grasshopper on Greenham Common, and at least I distinguished between the brown ones and the green ones. The brown ones would have been Chorthippus brunneus, while the green ones were, I suppose, Omocestus viridulus, as well, perhaps, as the stripe-winged grasshopper (Stenobothrus lineatus) and the mottled grasshopper (Myrmeleotettix maculatus).
I now feel constrained to mention something that I know to be a fact, whatever any entomologist may say. Some of the brown grasshoppers I caught had rosy hind wings. I couldn’t have invented this and I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Yet the only rosy-winged grasshopper given by Michael Chinery is Oedipoda germanica, which he says is a species not normally found in the British Isles. Also, in his illustration, it looks very large - an absolute whopper - and I don’t recall that these were. I must just remain puzzled.
I used to catch the grasshoppers with a butterfly net and then transfer them to a shoe-box with ventilation holes and a small trapdoor cut in the lid. I became careful not to hold them at all tightly, for if I did so they would exude a drop of orange-coloured fluid from their mouths, and this, I felt sure, must be a reaction to distress. When I got the box home I simply put it in the middle of the paddock, took the lid off and left it.
Yet the paddock never became colonized. No grasshoppers ever appeared the following year. No doubt they pined for their heather and peaty wasteland. They must just have been the wrong sort of grasshoppers, I suppose, for the paddock was a typical enough meadow. I never asked advice, so I remain ignorant of the reason to this day.
My vivid memory of Greenham Common as a great, wide waste of heather, in parts lonely, is reinforced by another incident of quite a different kind - one obviously related to Mr Punch. One summer afternoon I fell out with my sister. This wasn’t unusual, of course. Children in families are continually falling out. In fact, it’s only when you’re grown up and observe other families that you realize how often this occurs - virtually daily. My sister was amiable as a rule and I loved her all through my childhood because she, like my father, could be relied upon to tell you the truth; also, she was apt to produce things from an exciting bag of tricks, like Percy’s Reliques or the poetry of T. S. Eliot. But she had a sharp tongue, which at times could be really hurtful, and both she and my brother regarded me as - and made me feel that I was - a spoilt little beast. There wasn’t, really, any way in which I, at eight, could expect to keep my end up with a highly intelligent seventeen-year-old who was head girl of her school and shortly going up to Girton. If you hit her - which I more than once did, in frenzy - you were automatically in the wrong and in for a wigging. If you tried to answer back you hadn’t a hope. The reply would be even more blistering than what you had tried to answer.
I can’t recall, after all these years, what this particular row was about: but my sister was so scathing that I felt driven to desperation. (At least Mr Punch, at the party, had not addressed me.) It was her final remark that marshalled me the way that I was going. It was something along the lines of ‘And everyone would be only too glad if you went away and stayed away.’
I didn’t have any clear intention of doing that, but I did feel, vaguely, that I wanted to go away and be alone, in solitude, for a good, long time; somewhere where I wouldn’t be found. I went down through the paddock and out of the gate into Monkey Lane. Along the lane I walked - it was an empty country lane in those days - and along the next lane (Pinchington Lane) to the west side of Greenham Common. Then I set off across the Common itself.
I remember it was hot but overcast. There was distant thunder about. The meadow browns and cinnabars were perched on the heather and the grasshoppers were zipping. I went on with a feeling of abandonment — of having taken a step further than I knew what to do with. I had no idea what the outcome of this escapade was going to be. I had never done anything like this before; but I was in such a state that I didn’t care. I had let go. I simply wanted to go on walking across the expanse of the Common, where you could actually see that there was nobody you were going to meet; where you really were alone. Walking was comforting, too: better than hiding would have been, or even smashing a window (a deed I sometimes used to have recourse to when in a temper). The walking soothed my frustration and feeling of grievance. I wasn’t hiding: I was doing something.
All that afternoon I walked on across the Common. In the middle there was a lonely cottage, known as ‘Noah’s Ark’. I came to Noah’s Ark and passed it. I felt safe enough in the sense that I didn’t feel myself in any danger, but I also felt a little scared, like a child who has ventured into the deep end for the first time. Yet the surroundings were empty and peaceful as could be, and the solitude went on suiting me. Anyway, there was nothing much to do but go on, unless I sat down, to which I didn’t feel disposed.
At last I came to the further, eastern edge of the Common. I can’t recall, now, exactly how far I got, but I suppose it must have been somewhere on the outskirts of Brimpton. This surprises me now, for I have the map in front of me and from my home the whole distance is certainly over five miles. It was as the Common came to an end that my strange fit - to which it had, of course, formed the setting - came to an end also. Here were houses and people again - the normal world, even though far from home. What should I do now? It was borne in upon me that there was no course - no course at all - open to me but simply to go back. This, as I have since learned over and over, is the only termination to any loss of self-control.
I turned and began tramping back, but I was tired out. My pace across the Common became slower and slower. I had a strong notion, now, that I wouldn’t be up to walking the whole way.
And then an odd and lucky chance occurred. I had been vaguely aware, for some little time, of two boys on bicycles passing me, coming back and re-passing, but apart from noticing that they were a little older than myself, I had been too tired and preoccupied to give them any close attention. Finally, however, with a grating of boots on the road, they stopped beside me and asked me where I was going. When I told them that I was walking the length of the Common and further, they were, of course, surprised. ‘Cor, that’s a bit of a way,’ said one of them; but they didn’t ask any more questions. Then, friendlily enough, the older one suggested that he should give me a lift on the bar of his bicycle.
I was only too ready. The bar was hard and uncomfortable, and with me perched in front of him the boy was horribly slow and wobbly. But we got along - perhaps as much as a mile and a half. I can’t remember what we talked about, except that I asked them whether they were brothers and they said no. They weren’t in the least inquisitive about what I was doing or why I was walking so far alone. They maintained a kind of detached sociability, as though they felt they might as well give me a lift as pass the time in any other way.
They took me as far as Noah’s Ark. In spite of the wobbliness and the bar pressing into my not-very-well-covered buttocks, I would have liked to ask them to go further, but felt I couldn’t decently do so. They dropped me. I thanked them and they set off back, in the summer twilight, towards Brimpton.
I plodded on and eventually got back home dead beat. Well, like the business at Mr Punch’s party, it had worked all right. Everyone was in a fine old taking, my mother and my sister close to tears and my father half-minded to alert the police. I had been away four or five hours, if not more. They were too much relieved to scold me. I gave my mother my version of my quarrel with my sister, said I felt better now and not cross any more; had a bath and went to bed. But for several years afterwards my sister and I were never easy together on Greenham Common. She must have suffered a great deal of worry and apprehension that afternoon, and I don’t really know that she deserved it. I have often felt, since, that it was a pity that this exploit did work. It would have been better if I had been blamed and punished, for as things turned out they only served to confirm the fancy-dress party behaviour pattern. The best I can plead is that my sister had been exceptionally contemptuous and cutting. My over-reaction, however, had been a general surprise, and not least to me.
The Enborne brook, two miles or so east of the ruined Falkland mill, winds along the southern edge of what used to be Greenham Common - or below it. There were woods and copses all along the left bank, and one of these was known in our family as ‘Miss Tull’s Wood’. I don’t really know who Miss Tull was, but one of my father’s patients - and later, a good friend to me - was Mr Bertie Tull, a wealthy landowner with a big house on the northern side of the Common; so I suppose there was some connection. Miss Tull’s Wood was the place for primroses. We used to go there with my father in the car - bringing a picnic if the day was warm enough - down the rather steep and narrow lane leading off the Common to the ford. (There were several fords along the length of the Enborne then, and fewer bridges.) The wood was full of primroses. A hundred people could have picked them for an hour and there would still have been masses. We would pick a flat basketful, so that the top was a cushion of primroses packed tight, and then dip the bottom in the shallow river to keep them fresh. I can remember pressing my face into them. Today, their cool softness and scent always recall Miss Tull’s Wood. When we were tired of picking primroses we would sit on the bank and watch the stream go by.
One April afternoon my sister and I had been sitting silent and more or less motionless for some time, when from the field beyond a rabbit came loping up to the opposite bank of the river and without hesitation, as though it were in the habit of it, plunged in and swam across, shook itself and disappeared along our bank downstream. I know that all wild animals can swim if they’re put to it, but I have never since seen a rabbit swimming.
One day in June, when I was about five or six, my father took me out in the car, through Newbury and westward along the Bath Road -Jane Austen’s Bath Road (the A4). There wasn’t a great deal of traffic in those days of the ‘twenties. It must be borne in mind, too, how much slower cars went and how relatively limited their range was. My father seldom drove much over thirty m.p.h., and when, later, my sister drove at forty, it seemed frighteningly fast. From our Newbury home, Winchester, Pangbourne or Reading were virtually our limit: never London.
Along the Bath Road we went, a matter of a good five miles. Here there is a pub. called The Halfway (halfway between Newbury and Hungerford), and opposite the pub. a little lane. This lane runs for perhaps three or four hundred yards between hedges covered with honeysuckle and dog rose, and at its foot lies the broad Kennet, spanned by a plank footbridge. We had come to what is still known as The Wilderness.
The reaction of a simple creature - or a child - on first seeing a true river has already been unforgettably expressed by Kenneth Grahame at the opening of The Wind in the Willows. I certainly felt everything that the Mole felt and was carried away with delight as I held my father’s hand across the plank bridge. What Kenneth Grahame’s description doesn’t include, however, is any birds or animals (except, of course, the Water Rat). As we stepped off the plank bridge and began strolling up the right bank, almost the first thing I saw was a kingfisher flying past us fast and low on the other side of the river.
This certainly was - and still is - a true wilderness, of a kind almost as different from Greenham Common as the Amazon from the Oklahoma plains. All along its course, from Marlborough to Reading, the Kennet flows in several beds and has innumerable side-streams and carriers. In places the valley is the best part of half a mile wide. But nowhere, I think, is it wider than in the Wilderness between Halfway and Kintbury, which is a mile long and perhaps 600 yards broad. It is thick woodland, virtually pathless, and marshy at all times of the year; the haunt of herons, grebes, water rails, teal, shelduck in season, spotted woodpeckers, reed warblers and grasshopper warblers. Otters there certainly were, but there wasn’t much chance of coming on one, for it is simply not practicable to penetrate or wander about in that dense, boggy place.
I was still too little to do much in the way of specialized bird-watching, though I enjoyed seeing the moorhens, coots and swans on the open water. What struck me most forcibly on that first visit - the first of many - was watching the trout rising to the mayfly: and I’m pretty certain that that was what my father had brought me down to see. I saw my first trout for myself, without prompting. It was close in under the bank that we were walking up, and I had hardly noticed it before it startled and shot away into deep water.
My father pointed silently to a hawthorn bush overhanging the opposite bank of the river. I watched for perhaps half a minute, and was beginning to wonder what I was supposed to be looking at when the surface was broken, with a kind of unhurried intentness, by a rising trout. I saw the rings go radiating outwards and the whole circle of the rise float downstream until, diminishing little by little, it died away on the flow.
‘Isn’t he a splendid chap?’ said my father. ‘He’ll do it again in a minute, I expect.’
He did, and this time I watched the mayfly drifting down on the surface, and anticipated the moment when the trout would rise to gulp it down. We remained sitting on the bank for perhaps ten minutes or more, and I found a point of vantage from which I could actually see the trout beneath the water, veering from side to side with flickering of its tail, sometimes allowing itself to be carried down a few feet before recovering its old position, yet always on the watch for the next mayfly. When it rose I could see the dark spots along its side, and once the dorsal fin broke surface as it turned to follow a fly a couple of feet downstream before taking it.
There were other footbridges - a bit out of repair and precarious, some of them — and on these we stood and looked down into the weed and the bed of the stream. My father showed me the difference between a grayling and a trout, and I learnt to recognize the chequered pattern of the grayling’s high, long-based dorsal fin and the characteristic look of a grayling rise, different from that of a trout — or of a chub, for that matter. I remember I had a little, white, two-bladed penknife which someone had recently given me, and that while standing on one of the bridges I unluckily happened to drop it into the river. It must be down there still.
We took to going to the Halfway Wilderness quite often, for my father, though not himself a particularly keen fisherman (I expect he could have fished it if he had wanted to), saw that I was elated by the river and wished for nothing better than to walk the mile up its length to Wawcott and back on a sunny afternoon. One hot, still evening of high summer, we came upon a fisherman throwing a fly. This turned out to be a friend of my father, a celebrated fisherman named Dr Mottram. I watched fascinated as he splashlessly shot the light, delicate line and leader straight out to what seemed to me an incredible distance, let them drift down, recovered and re-cast. My father showed me the best place to stand when someone is casting - just behind his left shoulder. While we were there Dr Mottram rose, played and landed a trout, which he insisted on giving to us. He showed me how to pass reeds through the gills and carry it by them.
‘Is he a very good fisherman?’ I asked my father, as we went on.
‘Dr Mottram?’ he replied. ‘He’d catch a fish where no fish was.’
‘How d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Not really?’
‘No; but you see, the thing is to find a fish and induce him to rise.’
Well, he induced me to rise all right. From that time on I knew I wanted to be a fly fisherman and bring home trout for supper.
But if I had lost my heart to the Kennet, with its great reed maces, its crowfoot and arrowhead and yellow water lilies (brandy-bottles) in the still pools, I still had another one to lose to the Downs. There are two ranges of Downs, one on each side of the Berkshire-North Hampshire area, the Kennet and Enborne valleys: the northerly, White Horse downs, which run westward from Streatley, south of Harwell and Wantage and on to Astbury and Liddington; and the southerly, Basingstoke-Winchester downs. It was to these latter that I always went with my father; or sometimes all five of the family would go. I can’t remember ever to have done anything - anything at all - more delightful than walking on the crest of the downs, looking away into the purple, heat-rimmed edge of the horizon.
The downs, like Greenham Common, were a different country: different soil, grass, flowers, birds, and the land put to a different use. In those days, before the coming of the tractor, they were still mainly a place to graze sheep and train race-horses. Hardly anybody used to go up there except the shepherds, the race-horse trainers and their lads. The sunlight, the breeze and the stillness seemed intensified rather than interrupted by a grazing flock. Leisurely and unhurriedly they moved on across the grass, and every now and then would come the unresonant, cloppering tinkle of the bell round the neck of the bell-wether - the true sound of the downs on a hot afternoon - intermittent and unaltering as bird-song. Once, I remember, a shepherd greeted my father, ‘’Aft’noon, Doctor,’ and then, after a few exchanges, rather tentatively, ‘D’you like t’ave a look at this ‘ere arm o’ mine? ’E don’t seem just right yet.’ My father did so. I was well aware of standing orders - never show curiosity about patients or try to overhear consultations - and went to find another interest some way off.
God knows there were enough. The chalk itself always attracted me. The topsoil was shallow and friable, and the chalk subsoil was always breaking through, with or without the help of rabbits. You really could write - on a beech tree, for instance - with a lump of this chalk, although it was more scratchy than the sticks of chalk you bought in shops. Sometimes, though rarely, you might come upon a ‘shepherd’s crown’; a fossil sea-urchin. I still have three of these from those days long ago. One is a real beauty: about two and a half inches in diameter and an inch and a quarter thick; regularly shaped liked a heart, with the five lines of tubes clearly marked on top, as is the vent on the bottom. I. O. Evans, in The Observer’s Book of British Geology, says of these, ‘In the Chalk, they are so plentiful as to have been given folk names; the peasantry call the more pointed sea-urchins “shepherds’ crowns” or ‘‘shepherds’ mitres”, and the flatter, broader type, shaped like a playing-card heart, “fairy hearts” or “fairy loaves”.’
I soon found out that the chalk had its own flowers. The most beautiful were the wild orchids, which still bloom on the northward slope of Cottington’s Hill almost as though in a terraced garden bed. Lady’s slipper, too, flowered everywhere, as did the purple thyme. In season the cowslips grew thickly. I don’t know anything nicer in the way of wild flowers than a big bunch of cowslips, and I rather think Shakespeare was of the same opinion, e.g., A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, 1, lines 10-16.
‘The cowslips tall her pensioners be
In their gold coats spots you see:
Those be rubies, fairy favours:
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’
Another flower I liked was the salad burnet. Since it was called the salad burnet I used to eat the leaves, supposing that you were meant to; but I’ve never really taken to them. They taste oily and rather hot. Milkwort there was, the flowers of which can vary with the soil from pure blue to almost white: and wild gentians, yellow wort, horseshoe vetch, dropwort, scabious, yellow rockrose and the beautiful purple-pink sainfoin: and everywhere, of course, the ragwort, covered with the yellow-and-black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth.
Downland woods, too, were different from those in the vale below. The beech hangers of the downs - dry, open-growing and airy, with no grass underfoot and the sunlight falling dappled and quick-moving through the patulous leaves - were quite unlike the damp Bluebell Wood, or the Sandleford copses of oak and hawthorn. The smooth-trunked, grey beeches, so thick about and standing so wide apart, pleased me simply by their huge size, even though they were no good for climbing. (You couldn’t scramble up into them.)
It wasn’t hard to learn to recognize the birds. The commonest and the most conspicuous were the yellowhammers. You could hardly miss them, for they seemed to have scarcely any fear of humans, and would sing out their little phrase from a hawthorn bush or a juniper almost at your elbow. There were cirl buntings too, but since in those days my bird-watching was spontaneous and largely uninstructed, I didn’t distinguish between them and yellowhammers. The linnets I liked, partly for their song but mainly, I think, because (by English ornithological standards, anyway) the males are rather showy, with their deep pink breasts and foreheads. Best of all were the goldfinches. They forage along the downs in small flocks (‘charms’) feeding on thistle seeds, groundsel and the like. I defy anyone not to be stirred by the sudden, twittering arrival of four or five goldfinches, fluttering and pecking from one thistle to another. I remember calling out in delight ‘Oh, Daddy, look!’ and getting the wonted reply ‘Aren’t they a lot of splendid chaps?’ Kestrels were not uncommon, and once I took one unawares, coming round the sharp corner of a beech hanger in time to get a close look at it sitting on a strand of wire, before it took alarm and flew away. What I chiefly noticed was the black band round the edge of the tail and the black spots, or speckling, all over the chestnut-coloured back.
Hares, too, were common in those days. In fact, you could hardly go up on the downs without seeing one or two. If you happened to be down-wind of them, and particularly if you could stand still in some sort of cover or half-cover such as a juniper (gorse doesn’t grow much on the Hampshire downs), they would sometimes come quite near before suddenly realizing what you were and dashing away. The thing I have always admired in hares is their ability to rotate their huge ears through at least 180° and, I wouldn’t be surprised, even a little more. In spring they caper in the open in a most arresting way, although I can’t actually recall seeing them do this when I was a little boy. It is a courtship display, or so I have read.
The highest point on these downs is Beacon Hill, which forms part of the Carnarvon estate. There is still a public footpath up it from the A34 on the east side (or the Earl allows people to climb it, anyway) but in those days, before Hitler’s war, there was a golf course below the hill, on the west side. It wasn’t much of a course by exacting standards - the turf was spongy and the greens were slow - but from the age of about eight I used to enjoy playing there and it was novel and pleasant to be driven a matter of nearly two miles through the woods of Highclere Park. This is why, when I was a little boy, we always used to climb Beacon Hill from the west side, where the golf course was. You can’t do that any more. The fascination of climbing Beacon Hill was that on the top lay — and still lies - Lord Carnarvon’s grave. This is that Lord Carnarvon who, with his faithful henchman Mr Carter, discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. (In those days everybody used to pronounce it Tootang-Karmen, and I still do.) We all knew the story: how the findings were more wonderful than anything ever seen (though no one had seen them as yet): how there was a terrible curse of the Pharaohs on molesters of the tomb, which had carried off Lord Carnarvon for a start: and that was only the beginning. Of course, it wasn’t my mother and father who told me about the Curse and its effects; but Constance did, and Thorn the gardener, and several other people in the village. It was common local knowledge.
Although there is a stone now, in those days the grave was unmarked; I suppose because the ground hadn’t yet settled, or for some such reason. The site, perhaps five yards square, was surrounded (as now) by high, stout iron railings and mown smooth. In the middle the turf rose into the man-long hump of the interment, at which I used to stare in numinous awe. There lay the Earl who had been killed by the Pharaoh’s Curse. This had all been his land, and his great castle could be seen a mile away among the trees. He had known the King George V. Yet none of this grandeur had served to avert the curse.
He had been such a nice man, by all accounts. There was an anecdote current which I had been told as an example of the manners of a true gentleman (and I have always remembered it). It seems that at some midsummer before the Great War, Lord Carnarvon was giving a fete in the grounds. There was a cricket match, and a marquee had been put up, in which the Earl’s tenants were sat down to a generous feast. Lord Carnarvon himself was strolling round, talking to people and making sure that everyone was having a good time, when he came across an old fellow who was addressing himself to a slab of ice pudding.
‘Hullo, Giles,’ he said. ‘’Hope you’re enjoying yourself?’
‘Well, my lord,’ replied Giles, ‘I don’t reckon much to this ’ere pudden. Why, ’tis stone cold.’
Lord Carnarvon picked up a spoon and tasted it. ‘So it is!’ he said. ‘What a shame! Smithers, take this away and bring Mr Giles some of that hot apple pie.’
A good seven miles westward along the downs stood and still stands Combe Gibbet. Although it was thought rather a long way in those days, we sometimes drove out there for a picnic. The story of the gibbet - what little we know of it - is a grim one, but even as a little boy I’d had it told to me. In 1676 two villagers of Inkpen, George Broomham and Dorothy Newman, were convicted at Winchester Assizes of murdering Broomham’s wife and son ‘with a staff on Inkpen Down. The crime excited so much local horror and vengeful indignation that the pair were sentenced, exceptionally, to be hanged ‘on the highest point in the county’ (Hampshire), which by a coincidence happened to be the summit of Combe Down. (It’s Inkpen Down on the north side of the ridge and Combe Down on the south. The summit is not quite 1,000 feet.) A double gallows was erected for the purpose and the pair were duly hanged. No one else has ever been hanged there, but it has become traditional to maintain the gallows. (I believe there is an obligation upon either the landlord or the tenant: I have been told which, but I forget.) When it becomes worn out by wind and weather it is replaced. The one there at the moment is quite recent, stout and good for years, I would say: but in the ‘twenties, when I first went up there, the gibbet was old, the tall upright rifted and leaning awry, the lateral arms, not very long, rifted and tapered by weather. I didn’t know it wasn’t the original. I used to imagine the scene, two hundred and fifty years before; the jeering villagers, the hangman and his wretched victims in the cart, the horses blown from their long pull up, no doubt some dignified J.P. or magistrate in charge, the clergyman with his book, all in the stiff west wind along the down. How long did it take them to strangle?
And yet I have never heard that anyone has felt the place to be sinister or eerie. Certainly I never did. It is difficult to feel anything but delight and elation as you look northwards, out across the fields and woodlands of the Kennet valley to the White Horse downs fifteen miles away. Newbury today is spoilt, its former character and comeliness ruined, but in those days, sixty years ago, from Combe Gibbet you could see it, six or seven miles away to the north-east, a trim little market town of red brick, between the hospital on the south and, on the north, the Lambourn river flowing past Donnington and Shaw to join the Kennet north of the race course.
Ah, yes, the race course!
My father was doctor and surgeon to the Newbury races. This meant that when there were meetings our family received honorary passes to the members’ enclosure and had lunch in the members’ dining-room. To this day the smell of cigars always recalls to me the noise and tumult of the race course - the esoteric bawling of the bookies (‘Two to one bar one! Two to one bar one!’ ‘I’ll lay six to four the field! Six to four the field!’), the tic-tac men in trilby hats, standing on the high points of the grandstand as they flailed their arms in gesticulations whose recipients one could never make out in the crowd below; the electric tote flashing its figures as the bets mounted; the bookies’ clerks, with polished brass boutonnières announcing their firms’ names, scribbling on great clipboards and handing out bright-coloured, numbered tickets; the debris, as the afternoon went on, of those same, torn-up tickets littering the tarmac and the trampled, aromatic turf; the jockeys’ names run up on a kind of hoist between two posts (Donohue, Wragg, Beery, Fox); the bowler hats (my father never wore one on any other occasion, though he did for a while when King George V died) and above all the beautiful, shining, lissom horses led round and round the paddock before the race, while the owners conversed with their overcoated jockeys. I knew Dorothy Paget by sight, and her colours (blue with a yellow hoop, cap yellow with a blue hoop), together with a few of the other famous owners of the day. I recall Golden Miller, that unbeatable horse, passing the post amid a storm of cheering, and Dorothy Paget leading him in.
Unlike going to the children’s parties, going to the races was not frightening or disconcerting. There was more than one reason for this. First, nothing was expected of you. You didn’t have to do anything in particular or talk to anyone you didn’t want to. I was allowed to go anywhere I liked by myself, from the paddock to the top of the grandstand, and as I grew older my father often used to lend me his binoculars. I know what it is to be literally alone in a crowd. No one took any notice of a small boy edging his way between fur coats and cigars to the paddock rails, to watch Forbra or Limelight led past almost within touching distance. In a crowd of adults I remained solitary. I had my own bookie, though; a dark, toothy gentleman called Mr Bingham, who, from me, good-naturedly accepted sixpenny bets. (Several other bookies had refused.) Having placed the bet, I would climb to the topmost point of the stand, race-card in hand, there to identify the runners as they were mounted and then watch them led out and released to canter up the course to the start. The very sight of the bright racing colours was exciting. Through the binoculars I could make out the mêlée, walking to and fro down at the starting-gate. Then the bell would ring - ‘They’re off!’ - and I would lean hard on the wall, elbows splayed and binoculars pressed close, watching my horse. Or sometimes, if it were steeplechasing, I would leave the members’ enclosure by way of the gate onto the flat course, cross it to the steeplechasing course and take up my stand at the water-jump to see them go over. I have a memory of a dismounted jockey actually up to his neck in the water - the only time I ever saw it - but I was still quite small and remember no details. The horse must have refused, I suppose, and pitched him over its head.
In winter, at the steeplechase meetings, Newbury race course was - and no doubt still is - notorious for being bitterly cold, with cutting winds. Two or three great, open braziers, each about six feet in diameter and piled with glowing coke, were situated about the members’ enclosure, and between races a circle of people two or three deep would form round them, stretching out their hands for warmth. It was near one of these that I saw, for the only time, King George V and Queen Mary; the only time, but it couldn’t have been to much better advantage. It was known, of course, that they were coming to the meeting that day. I hadn’t seen them arrive, although I had caught a distant glimpse of an entourage of grand-looking people up in the glass-enclosed royal box. One of the big braziers was sited round at the back of the members’ enclosure, on the tarmac leading down to the paddock and the jockeys’ changing-rooms. I was wedged in among people standing round this when I became aware of a stir. The crowd broke up and moved this way and that. Naturally, I moved too, and then, looking round, saw the King and Queen approaching. They looked exactly like the photographs of themselves in the newspapers; the King bearded and moustached, with the face of someone who - you would think -didn’t smile much; Queen Mary tall and majestic, with a purple toque and a spotted veil. They paused for a few moments by the brazier, chatting quietly to two or three people with them, and then made their way down to the paddock. I can see clearly, in memory, the King studying his race-card as he walked away.
It must be remembered that in those days not only was there no television; there were no newsreels in provincial cinemas — films were silent, anyway - and royal walkabouts hadn’t been invented (though I recall a charming, true story of the King and Queen walking in St James’s Park and stopping deliberately to pose for a little girl with a box camera). To find yourself within spitting distance of the King and Queen was a terrific thrill for a small boy.
I said there was more than one reason for my feeling no nervousness of going to the races. We had, in effect, our own sitting-room — virtually private, and warm as toast on even the bleakest days. This was the race course hospital, a room about as big as a fair-sized drawing-room, situated just behind the members’ grandstand and adjacent to the jockeys’ changing-room. It had three beds made up with sheets and blankets; it had comfortable chairs and a roaring fire — and it had Nurse Lowe.
Nurse Lowe was exactly like a nanny from a Victorian children’s story-book - Maria Edgeworth or Frances Hodgson Burnett. At this time she was, I suppose, in her fifties or even a little more. She was on the plump side, with gold-rimmed spectacles, rosy cheeks, white hair, a gentle voice and a beautiful smile. I’m afraid I was not always a very well-behaved little boy, but in Nurse Lowe’s company it was easy to be as good as gold. Gentleness and kindness surrounded her like an invisible nimbus. I can’t remember anything that we ever said to each other, but I certainly don’t forget sitting by the hospital fire and talking to Nurse Lowe.
She used to knit and she used to darn. She had a great, open bag with her, full of socks and woolly vests and other mending. Her darning egg used to delight me. I haven’t seen another for years past. It was about as big as a man’s fist or perhaps a little smaller, and made of— or at any rate outwardly covered with - celluloid, I suppose (for plastics had not yet come on the market). It was bluntly ovoid; and one end was black while the other was white. The idea was that you put it into, say, the heel of a sock with the appropriately coloured end showing conspicuously through the hole to be darned. Then you held the whole thing clutched in your left hand and darned over the hole until the end of the egg was covered up. I felt that this was what the Americans call ‘neat’: I still think so. I wonder where that egg is now. People don’t darn as much as they used to.
Sometimes Nurse Lowe would get a tip from a jockey - so would my father, for that matter - and give me a shilling or a florin to put on for her; for she was not supposed to leave the hospital. Whenever a jockey was brought in on a stretcher - sometimes unconscious, sometimes moaning or muttering curses in his pain - my brother and my sister and I had to look sharp and slip out quickly and unobtrusively, for we weren’t really allowed to be there, and didn’t want to get my father into trouble or to be ourselves forbidden to frequent the hospital at all. I remember once a jockey being carried in, his stretcher surrounded by two or three obviously important people in bowler hats, carnations and binoculars. My brother was the one who caught it for not becoming invisible quickly enough.
‘Come, tumble out, boy, tumble out!’ barked one of these grandees peremptorily.
I wasn’t used to seeing my elder brother, who to me seemed almost grown-up, scuttling out of the way without a word. But that was what he did. ‘Whoever’s that?’ I asked, as soon as we were both outside, somewhat disordered.
‘Oh, that’s old Baxendale,’ said my brother with an air of patient toleration, rather as though he had been merely humouring the idiosyncrasies of the gentleman by acting in so undignified a way. Mr Baxendale (another patient of my father) I vaguely knew to be in some capacity or other the head of the whole race course and everything in it. I was appropriately impressed and somewhat apprehensive, but nothing more came of the matter.
My father - as I hope to make clear in the course of this book - although so grave and unsmiling in his manner, had a great gift of what one might term cryptic or veiled humour. This quality made friends for him among all manner of people who sensed intuitively this singular mixture of reserve with warmth and even mischief. One of these was the Comic Waiter.
I don’t know by what system the race course authorities recruited staff like barmen, cooks and waiters for the race meetings. They would not, of course, have had a permanent staff, the meetings being relatively infrequent. I suppose they sharked up a list of lawless resolutes. (There spring to my mind the words used by some contemporary historian - Clarendon? - to describe the shortcomings of a Royalist army in the civil war: he says that it consisted of ‘old, decayed tapsters and the like’.) No doubt a lot of the racecourse people were engaged on a regular basis, as no doubt were my father and Nurse Lowe - and for all I know, Mr Baxendale. Anyhow, the Comic Waiter was always to be found on duty in the members’ dining-room.
The Comic Waiter used to make a great business of serving my father. He would bring the steak (or whatever it was) and put down the plate not in front of my father but a foot or two away, in some convenient place. Then he would add the vegetables himself, commenting appropriately the while (‘This cauliflower is certainly one not to be missed, Doctor’), and finally, having arranged everything on the plate to his satisfaction, would place it before my father, remarking something like ‘There, Doctor; I think you’ll find that’ll taste remarkably good.’
My father used to play up to the Comic Waiter, rather as though they were a sort of duo in a music-hall sketch. He would ask him whether he had a horse for the two-thirty, express the hope that his feet weren’t hurting him, or enquire whether the Stilton cheese was any good. (‘Good, Doctor? Why, it won at Cheltenham only last week!’)
Now one day my father and I were finishing lunch together in the members’ dining-room by ourselves. I can’t remember where the rest of the family were, but anyhow they weren’t there. We had coffee, my father signed the bill and we made our way towards the revolving doors. As we approached them, we became aware of a stout, middle-aged lady who was, as they say, going on a whole piece. The recipient was the poor Comic Waiter, who was getting most of it, although the head waiter, standing near by, was also in the line of fire.
‘I’m very sorry; I’m very sorry indeed, madam,’ the Comic Waiter kept repeating. ‘I’m extremely sorry -’
None of this contrition and apology was stemming the flow of the imperious lady, whom there was plainly no stopping. As we came closer I sensed my father’s silent antagonism as he looked from her to the Comic Waiter and back.
‘And,’ she said, drawing herself together for another burst, ‘and they never helped me on with my coat or anything -
‘Serve you right, too, you silly old cow,’ said my father, stepped into the revolving doors and was gone into the hurly-burly of the course outside.
I, coming behind, had just time to see the Comic Waiter clap his hand over his mouth, while the head waiter broke into a quickly checked guffaw. I went through the doors at once and fast, before she might take it into her head to grab me. Catching up, I said nothing to my father, or he to me; there was no need, really.
On another occasion my father had taken me out to the grounds of a big estate at Speen, on the further side of Newbury, to see the Police Sports. They were thrilling. The races were started with real pistol shots. The sack race was a riot, and so was the obstacle race. There were real Life Guards on their great, black horses, in full dress uniform of scarlet coats, shining helmets and breastplates. They did a musical ride and then formed into couples, face to face and side by side, for their horses to ‘dance’. (They waltzed, I rather think.) I remember that I caused some laughter by saying to my father ‘I think I’ll be one of those when I grow up.’
The crowd was so thick and I was so small that it was hard to see. My father got hold of a wooden chair and planted it beside us, and I scrambled up onto it. I hadn’t been there long when a man rather like Bairnsfather’s Old Bill, with a clay pipe full of shag and string round the knees of his corduroys, got up on the bar along the side of the chair and balanced himself with a hand across its back. He seemed precarious, and I certainly felt so as we both began to tilt and rock.
‘Gosh, this seems a bit wobbly,’ I said.
‘Oh, be it, son?’ replied he companionably. ‘Well, just you ‘ang on tight -’
At this moment my father looked round and saw what was going on.
‘Here, you get down!’ he said. ‘It’s not your chair.’
The man got down, looking at my father with surly resentment.
‘Nor it ain’t the lad’s chair, neither,’ he said.
I felt ill-at-ease and embarrassed, caught in the middle of this exchange. I was out of countenance and didn’t know what I ought to do.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ I muttered sheepishly.
‘Don’t speak to him!’ said my father brusquely. ‘Don’t have anything to do with him!’ And with this he returned his attention to the track.
It worked, of course. The man said no more and edged away in the crowd. But the encounter taught me a lot. Silence and disregard, properly used, can be more effective than any amount of speech.
My father, like the old man in the folk tale, often had his own words for things. Some of these were simply onomatopoeic. I used to suffer, sometimes, from sneezing fits - probably hay fever, though I never thought about it. My father feared that this, if not controlled, might injure the mucous membrane in my nose by blowing it down into folds. ‘I can’t have any more of that kash aming,’ he would say reproachfully. The extraordinary thing was that that, too, worked. I usually found I could thereupon stop kashaming.
Crying, too, he disfavoured, unless there was good cause, such as a bang on the head, a blow on the funny-bone or any of the other accidents common in childhood. He didn’t like you to cry for mental reasons only.
‘I don’t want any of that bad bowleting, my boy, when it’s time to go back to school.’ He was sympathetic, though, to your feelings. ‘No one likes going back to work after a holiday,’ he would say, as you struggled to hold back your tears. Or ‘All good things come to an end.’
The car - or any car, for that matter - he always called the ‘bouffam’. (In his letters to me he used to spell it ‘bougham’.) ‘I’m going into Newbury in the bouffam.’ he would announce, ‘if anyone wants to come along.’ The word was in common use throughout the family, and I have gone on using it with my own wife and children and anyone else who has become an intimate friend. I always supposed that this, too, was onomatopoeic, imitating the shaking reverberation of a car’s engine when idling, which was general during the early decades of this century. Years later, however - one day during the late ‘seventies - I received from an American friend a page from a motor magazine: an article with the title ‘Little Known of Bouffam/Bouffum’. It appeared that there really was a car of this name during the Edwardian decade, but it had ceased to be manufactured and, as the article said, little was now known about it. I have wondered since why my father should have adopted it as a generic term for any car, including his own, for to my knowledge he never owned one of the mysterious Bouffams. During the Edwardian decade, as I have said, he had a De Dion Bouton, but all through my lifetime we had a series of Wolseleys.
A more useful word (because there is no single equivalent for it) was ‘sadbit’. In the first place, a sadbit could be literally a ‘sad bit’: e.g., ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a book that’s full of sadbits.’ But it could also be a tragic conclusion, in reality or fiction. Here the advantage of the word was that it saved the speaker from having to go into distressing detail.
‘Daddy, what happened to those kittens that Mr Cottrell said they couldn’t be doing with?’
‘It’s a sadbit, I’m afraid.’ Nothing more need be said.
‘Splendid chap, Keats. ‘Pity it was all such a sadbit.’
‘Well, I think if Mrs Kennedy really means to go on with that idea of a cricket match it’ll probably turn out to be a very sadbit.’
‘If Ramsay MacDonald gets back in, won’t that be a sadbit?’
But a sadbit could also be a person.
‘Everyone’s saying the new headmaster at the grammar school’s an awful sadbit.’
‘There were so many sadbits there that I came away early.’
Perhaps his best word was ‘wugular’; and this, too, I have retained, never having come across any one word that covers all its applications. Like the Geordie word ‘canny’, it can mean all sorts of things. Wugular could mean anything from ‘unusual’ to ‘dangerous’ and from ‘sinister’ to ‘sexually perverted’.
‘It’s Bank Holiday tomorrow,’ he might say, ‘so there’ll be a lot of wugular chaps on the road. Funny fellows, comic men and clowns of private life.’
‘I saw a wugular bird out at Highclere this morning. I’m not at all sure it wasn’t a brambling.’
‘I don’t think I’d care to go there at night. It’s a wugular sort of place.’ This meant either a dangerous place or a place where you might be set upon, for my father had no superstitious fears.
‘That Edgar Allan Poe must have been a wugular chap, I should think.’
Once, when I was about twelve, having intuitively sensed something I shuddered at, without understanding, about the second master at my prep. school, I said to my father ‘I can’t help feeling, Daddy, that Mr Morris is by no means free from wugularity.’ ‘I’m quite sure of it,’ replied my father, in a tone that precluded further speculation. When I grew older I came to realize that Mr Morris had been, as they say, as bent as a nine-bob note. He was a sadistic paederast, really.
At bedtime, there was always the hope that my father might come upstairs and tell me a story - for you couldn’t depend on it. Often, in those days, if you asked an adult (not my father) to tell you a story, he (or she) would reply,
‘I’ll tell you a story of Jackamanory,
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another of Jack and his brother
And now my story’s done.’
This was maddening, especially as you knew what was coming as soon as they started. But my father was, as he himself would have said, upsides with this. He told many stories about Jackamanory, a little boy who used to get lost in the town, or taken to the fair or a cricket match, or even to London. But Jackamanory, in the gradual and casual way of oral bedtime stories, came to be superseded by the episodic tales of Hedgehog.
If anything makes me realize that childhood is irrecoverable, it is thinking about Hedgehog. After all these years I remember scarcely anything that Hedgehog and his friends did. I recall that they had a cricket match, and on another occasion they went to the seaside. Everything they did was more or less trivial, homespun and not by any means cliff-hanging. There were no spies, chases, bombs or arrests. Looking back on them now, the stories seem a constituent part of their occasion; inseparable from the time and place where they were told, the nature and style of the person who told them and of the person who listened. My father’s narrative manner was low-keyed and undramatic, pausing and conversational. His listener was fully receptive and uncritical, tired after a long day of childhood, relaxed after supper and a bath, happy with the kind of story which was familiar and singular to himself; and with the gratification of the story-teller being there, leaning with clasped hands upon the high brass rail at the foot of the bed. You were free to ask questions and interrupt. No, it didn’t really matter what Hedgehog actually did, while the swifts flew high and screaming outside in the summer dusk or the gas fire quietly poppled in winter. I am fairly sure, from what I can remember, that he was ad-libbed. His evening adventure was ephemeral as the evening itself and the style of the telling became as familiar as the smell of my father’s old tweed coat.
So then they would leave the door open with the landing light on, and I would set about going to sleep, often saying over to myself one of Constance’s wonderful verses. Wherever can she have got them? It must, surely - it can only - have been from the Girl Guides.
‘I went to the pictures tomorrow.
I took a front seat at the back.
I fell from the floor to the gallery
And broke a front bone in my back.
The band struck up but did not play,
So I sat down and walked away.’
‘The following Sunday being Ash Wednesday, a meeting will be held in the vestry to decide which colour the wall shall be whitewashed. Admission free, pay at the door. Seats inside, sit on the floor. We will now sing -
‘We went to the animals’ fair.
The birds and the beasts were there.
The grey baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.
The monkey fell out of his bunk
And slid down the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant sneezed and fell on his knees,
But what became of the monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey -’
There were others. One I remember proving so fascinating, later, to the boys at my prep. school that I used to have to say it over and over again.
‘There was an old man from beyond Japan
And his name was Ching Ching Chinaman.
His body was long and his legs were short
And this funny man couldn’t walk or talk.
Jing jang jorum, bibba labbalorum
One cheer more for the hippy happy day.
Go, go, go to the utty utty i,
Tiddle-fi, tiddle-fi, Chinese doll.
They took him up to the top of the hill
And they rolled him down like a Beecham’s pill.
They drove a cab to the Brighton pier
And they poured him out like a glass of beer.
Jing jang jorum-’
But I would be asleep.