I liked fetching the washing from the Moscrops’, and my mother liked washing for Mrs. Moscrop better than for anybody else. That was because Mrs. Moscrop always wrapped a bar of yellow soap in with the washing. There wasn’t anyone else who thought of a thing like that.
The Moscrops’ shop stood on a corner. The frontage was on the main road. To reach the bakehouse at the back you went down the side-street. The shop window looked very gay that night, especially as the streets were full of writhing yellow fog. It was a few days of Christmas. Chinese lanterns, some in long concertina shapes, some spherical, all lit with candles, reinforced the two gas jets which normally lighted the window. There was a long brass tube running the length of the window with half a dozen gas points sprouting from it like nipples, but only one at either end was ever lit. I suppose the Moscrops, like the rest of us in Hulme, had to think of pennies.
But that idea didn’t occur to me then. Moscrops’ was an oasis of light in the dingy slum, a lounging-place and rendezvous of the boys and girls, and on that particular night, with holly stuck into the tops of cakes, with coloured paper chains dangling in loops from one Chinese lantern to another, with “A Merry Christmas” hanging in separate silver letters from a string that was itself sparkling as though with hoar frost, Moscrops’ looked as enchanting a window as a child could wish. There were loaves covered with crisp brown crust, buns oozing currants, Christmas puddings, cloth-covered, in basins, tall jars of biscuits, and bottles of sweets.
When I pushed open the door, a bell above it gave one unresonant sound, more of a click than a ring, and there I was with the raw night shut out, the familiar, warm, foody smell all about me. Mrs. Moscrop, squat and rounded and friendly as one of her own cottage loaves, came in from the parlour behind the shop. “Oh, the washing!” she said. “It’s not quite ready. Just go and talk to Mr. Moscrop in the bakehouse.”
I went down the side-street and pushed open the bakehouse door. A lovely place! Lovelier even than the shop, warmer, more filled with appetising smells. Two deal tables ran down the length of it. They were as smooth as silk. Old Moscrop, shuffling about in slippers, with no coat or waistcoat, with his shirt-sleeves rolled high up and with a long white apron tied about his middle, looked as though he had been born in the place. His face was as creamy and pudgy as dough. All the rest of him was covered by a fine white film of flour. The door of the great oven was open, and I could see into its cavernous depths. Row upon row of loaves was within, some in tins, some standing in the brown armour of their crust. Mr. Moscrop had a wooden spade with an enormously long handle. With this he could reach right to the back of the oven. Sliding the blade under the loaves, he began to draw them out and put them on the two long deal tables. Some were for Mr. Moscrop’s shop and delivery round. Others had been baked for customers who made up their own dough at home. Fanciful people pricked their initials into the top of the dough. Others wrote their names on pieces of paper and skewered them on to the loaves with matchsticks. These pieces of paper were now brown and brittle and would fall to bits if you touched them.
Mr. Moscrop cast an eye at me now and then, but he did not speak till all the loaves were on the tables. Then he pulled towards him a long jam roll, took up a knife, struck off an inch or two and pushed it towards me. In a voice as hoarse as though his throat were choked with flour, he said: “’Ave a pennorth.”
The ritual was unfailing. The washing was never ready. I was always sent to the bakehouse. Mr. Moscrop always invited me to have a pennorth. Then I went back to the shop.
But now my heart gave a thump. Two boys were standing outside the window. I knew they would still be there when I came out. They were. I was burdened with that monstrous bundle, the week’s washing of the Moscrop family assembled inside a sheet, with the four corners of the sheet tied together. I gripped the knot thus made with both hands. Only so could I carry the load, bending forward to allow it to rest on my bowed back. I was twelve years old, very thin and weak, and very much afraid of the two boys who, I knew, were following me. Presently they passed me at a light run, one in front of the other. Each gave a shoulder-shove as he went by, making me stagger. They vanished in the fog ahead. They would be waiting at the next corner, so, making the fog an ally, I doubled back and struck off down a side-street. I could get home by a detour. Presently, I heard them questing noisily, yelling the call with which they always assailed me: “Does your mother take in washing?” It went to a sort of tune, with a heavy stress on the first syllable of the last word, the “ing” trailing away and rising. I used to hear that call in my sleep. It haunted me everywhere.
Now they were on my trail. They had tumbled to my poor ruse. I turned swiftly to the right, down a dark lane between two sets of back doors. It was a fool’s move, for it was a dead-end. I could hear them whooping through the fog and prayed that they would rush by. But they didn’t. They felt their way cautiously down the entry and found me trembling, with my hands still clutching the big knot in the sheet, the bundle still on my back. I don’t know why they persecuted me. Simply because they were young and foolish and I was helpless, I suppose. They tore open the bundle, scattered its contents in the muddy lane, leapt among them like mad things, chanting their song, and ended by pushing me down into the sorry mess, snatching my cap from my head, and making off with wild hoots of laughter.
How I hated washing! It seemed to dominate life in our house in Shelley Street. It announced itself in the front window: Washing and Mangling done here. It made itself felt in the narrow passage-way which always smelt of steam and soap-suds. It overpowered the kitchen where, everlastingly, washed clothes hung from lines suspended under the ceiling, from clothes-horses grouped round the fire; and where the smell of ironing seemed the accompaniment of all life. But most of all it inhabited the scullery where the copper was, with a fire beneath, and where my mother wearily boiled, and rubbed on the rubbing-board, and rinsed and mangled.
What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down, with just the scullery thrown in! I don’t remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out.
I was the youngest of the lot, the kid, the nuisance, too young to be of much use to the others either for work or play. They were glad to be rid of me; and, looking back to the conditions we lived in, I don’t blame them for that. All the same, I felt it at the time. I could imagine the sigh of relief when the front door banged behind me. It made me turn in on myself.
One way of getting rid of me was often used in the summer. We had a small trade in herb beer, as a notice announced in our window alongside the one which advertised our activities in washing and mangling. I was often sent off to gather the herbs. A slab of bread and butter and a bottle of water were placed in a large basket, and, thus provisioned, I was expected to relieve the household of my presence for the best part of a day. I did so gladly.
It pleased me very much to turn out of the black fortress of Hulme and strike southwards along the Palatine Road that was not then the roaring tramway track it has since become. With the sky blue overhead and the road white with dust underfoot, I tramped along enthralled by the evidences that passed me of a world of unimaginable wealth and splendour. From their great houses that lined the road all the way between Fallowfield, Withington and Didsbury the kings of cotton came on their way to Manchester. Victorias and phaetons and barouches, coachmen with gloved hands and cockaded hats, footmen, gentlemen on horseback: all passed by along the road that was gay with hawthorn and cherry trees, laburnum, lilac and chestnut. Now and then, leaning back upon her cushions with a parasol above her head, some lady would be bound for the shops of St. Ann Square or Market Street, a lady so daunting with her great hat and flounced cape and lowered insolent eyes that it was impossible to conceive the circumstances in which her life was passed.
And there were the houses themselves to gaze upon and wonder at: big, square, stucco-fronted houses for the most part, each one standing splendidly in its own grounds, with conservatories looking like ornamental copies of the Crystal Palace, and stables, coach-houses and outbuildings in which you might have lost, and been no wiser, the four rooms of our house in Shelley Street.
Shelley Street! What mania was upon the builder when he so named that joyless, dingy alignment of brick traps! Byron Street and Keats Street and Southey Street and many another street blessed with the name if not the nature of poetry ran off the same black trunk of a high-road from which we branched. And to me, then, the names were nothing but names, and the name of Shelley Street evoked, as I passed the mansions of the rich, only a pang of bitterness and envy.
For, young as I was, I hated all the circumstances of my life. I hated the carrying of bundles of washing. I hated the turning of the mangle, and most of all I hated the close compression of a life that threw us all upon one another by day and night, and made us bite and snarl, and gave no one the chance to be alone. So that when I saw the fine rich houses on the Palatine Road, I burned to be as rich as the people who lived in them. I dreamed of a great room in which I might be alone, of a house full of servants whose chief job would be to prevent anyone from coming near me, of a park which would interpose itself between me and the touch and commerce of men.
I loved to go out on that job of gathering nettles and dandelions and the few other herbs from which our beer was brewed, because solitude could be had thereby. It did not take long in those days, even from the heart of Manchester, to reach flowery fields and hedgerows full of meadowsweet and ragged robin, nor did it take long to eat my bread and butter, swig my bottle of water, and fill the basket with herbs. Then there was nothing to do but wander here and there, lie for hours under a hedge, watch the swifts hurtling across the blue sky, and dream my unfailing dream of being rich.
It is incredible to me now that, then, I had never read a book. I couldn’t read; I couldn’t write. If I had been able to read, I should doubtless have been acquainted with many stories of boys like myself who had become cotton magnates or this or that, and whose first thought had been to make their old parents comfortable and relieve the want of their brothers and sisters. I was unaware that the morality of fiction demanded that of me; my dreams were crude and stark and centred upon myself. There was no one else in the picture. I didn’t want anyone else in the picture. I wanted just me, comfortable, isolated from the demands and stresses of life.
It was because that foul range of dungeons miscalled a street was also called Shelley Street that a turn came to my career. In the pleasant rural part to which I had gone one day in my quest for herbs there was—and is today—an old church of red sandstone squatting in the midst of its graveyard on an escarpment from which you look down to the low water-meadows where the Mersey loops and twists. It is still a pleasant spot, and then seemed paradisal, for the city had not yet marched to within miles of it; and nothing met the eye save a comely house here and there, and tall trees, and the meadows where cattle were wading in the deep pastures.
I lay in the churchyard with my filled basket at my side, with a grey tombstone, fallen askew, to support my back, and with nothing to do but let the tranquillity of the day drift by till it was time to set out for home. The old man who came into my life at that moment was named Oliver—the Reverend Eustace Oliver.
Reverend enough he looked to me, pacing slowly through the grass among the tombstones, his long white hair reaching almost to his shoulders, his clothes black and austere, the index finger of one hand tucked within the pages of a book.
I scrambled to my feet with a feeling that this man, clearly a parson, owned this churchyard and that I had better get out of it. I was picking up my basket when Mr. Oliver put a hand upon my shoulder with a touch extraordinarily gentle and forced me back to where I had been sitting. Then he, too, with a smile at me, sat down upon the grass. “Don’t run away,” he said. “This is God’s acre.”
When I got to know Mr. Oliver better, I found him full of these phrases—what, I suppose, we should call today cant phrases—but he meant them all, and he was a good man.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about that afternoon, except that he asked me my name and I said William Essex; and he asked me “How old are you, William?” and I said twelve; and he asked me where I lived and I said Shelley Street. Then he smiled again, and showed me the book he was carrying, and said: “I often wander down Shelley Street myself.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and said: “I’ve never seen you there, sir,” and he replied patiently: “No, no. I mean I read Shelley. This book, you see—these are Shelley’s poems.”
He held the book out to me and I said: “I can’t read, sir,” and to that he answered: “Well, let me read to you.”
It was a strange afternoon, and it ended magnificently in Mr. Oliver taking me to the kitchen door of the vicarage. He said to the cook, with his unfailing childlike smile: “Mary, feed my lambs,” and Mary fed me on tea and bread and butter, raspberry jam and cake.
It was with no thought of Mr. Oliver’s exalted discourse, but rather in the hope that the raspberry jam would happen again, that I contrived to be in the churchyard often during that summer. Sometimes Mr. Oliver appeared; sometimes he didn’t; and even when he did, the lamb was not always fed. But the feeding was frequent enough to justify a going on with the experiment; and the upshot of it all was that out of cupidity on my part and a tolerant friendliness on his there arose an easy relationship between us which ended by his offering me employment. The wages were something ridiculous, but I was to have my keep, and Mr. Oliver said he would teach me to read and write.
He kept his word, and for three years I lived happily. There was plenty to do. I was the servant of every servant about the place. I helped the cook in the kitchen, lighting fires, cleaning cutlery with bath brick ground to powder, scrubbing tables, keeping the joints turning before the fire. I helped the old man who looked after Mr. Oliver’s horse and garden, cleaning out the stable, carting manure to the garden dump, weeding the borders and raking the gravel of the paths, and occasionally even grooming the horse that was as old and grey and quiet-tempered as Mr. Oliver himself. I helped the sexton to keep the church clean; and in the first fury of my desire to be a good and useful servant, I even began to tidy up the tombstones, scraping with a nail the moss from the inscriptions. But Mr. Oliver wouldn’t have that. He stopped me gently with a murmured remark about the unimaginable touch of time.
My lessons with Mr. Oliver were at no stated hour. At any time of the day he was liable to drop on me, snatch me away from my work, and take me to the copybooks in his study. I liked the winter evenings best, with the oil lamps lit in the brown room full of faded books and with a fire rustling and twinkling in the grate. The room looked upon open fields, and not a sound disturbed us save the occasional crying of an owl. Mr. Oliver sat in his easy chair by the fire, wearing comfortable slippers and smoking a long clay pipe. I sat up to the table which was covered with a red cloth fringed with little balls, and wrote or read aloud from my book.
I owe this to Mr. Oliver: that as soon as I could read at all—and I took to it with really remarkable speed—he kept me reading solid things. We began with the Old Testament; we read some Burton and Browne and some of the speeches of Burke, strange enough stuff for a boy, but it gave me an early sense of rhythm, of richness, a palate which was never easy afterwards with the second-rate.
I didn’t realise it at the time; but what had happened to me was a chance in a million: I had acquired, and kept for three years, a private tutor of exceptional intelligence and skill at his job. Some whim had set him off; he was a bachelor and, I suppose, lonely; but having taken on the task, he did it thoroughly. He wrote a beautiful hand, and so do I to this day. He taught me something of geography. Never a place-name was mentioned but we must find it on the globe. He gave me a smattering of history and talked to me about the men and the happenings that filled the newspapers.
What is more, I had plenty to eat, and I had space and quiet. I slept in a loft over the stable, and, believe me, there was no hardship in that. It was a roomy loft with a window that looked over the fields. In the summer-time the river mists would be up, and I would see the cattle moving through them so deeply immersed that nothing was visible but their ridged spines like the keels of upturned boats floating on an opalescent lake. In the winter it was cosy in that loft, with three blankets on my bed of hay, and, above all, I was alone there. All the fabled joys of family life were taken from me, and I was happier, healthier and wiser in every way.
I worked hard. I was cleaning out the stable before seven in the morning, and what with my jobs and my lessons I had hardly a moment to spare till ten at night. My wages were ten pounds a year. Shameless exploitation of boy by wicked parson! Nonsense! What I owe to Eustace Oliver I can never repay.
At the end of the first year, he offered me my ten pounds. To a boy of thirteen, who had never handled more than a shilling at a time, it seemed an immense sum—a sum so immense that I could not accept the responsibility of touching it. There was nothing I could do with it. I could, of course, have given it to my parents, but the thought never crossed my mind. I saw them but rarely—more and more rarely as the year went on—and found myself wanting to see them less and less.
I needed no clothes. Though it was not in his bargain, Mr. Oliver provided them. I had plenty of food and a roof over my head; and, though I had by this time reached the point where I should have bought books if there were none to hand, I didn’t need books either. There was all Mr. Oliver’s library to explore.
So Mr. Oliver said he would bank the money for me and give me five per cent interest. And that was another piece of education for me. I learned that money I had no immediate use for had the delightful property of adding to itself with no effort whatever on my part.
“You see,” Mr. Oliver explained, “if you had a hundred pounds out at five per cent, then at the end of the year you’d have your hundred with another five added. But as you’ve only got ten, that is one tenth of a hundred, you’ll only get one tenth of the five pounds, that is ten shillings. But that is something, William, for the ten pounds plus the ten shillings will all be added to your next ten pounds, and then you’ll have twenty pounds ten shillings all earning five per cent.”
That was my first lesson both in mathematics and finance, and it seemed very good and wonderful to me.
I never had lessons with Mr. Oliver on a Saturday evening, for Saturday evenings were reserved for Mr. George Summerway. George Summerway lived in one of those fine stucco-fronted houses that were scattered about the church and vicarage. Like Mr. Oliver, he was a bachelor, but that was all, so far as I could see, that there was in common between them. Summerway was a huge, broad-shouldered man with a head overflowing with crisp black hair. He had a loud Lancashire voice that bellowed forth frighteningly from his florid face. He was always dressed with an overpowering elegance. He ran to tight trousers and sprigged waistcoats and a white beaver hat. You could see him driving up to town most days, managing the reins with an air, while a depressed-looking coachman sat beside him in the dogcart.
Throughout the time I lived with Mr. Oliver, he and George Summerway dined at one another’s houses on alternate Saturday nights. It was on a Saturday night in the winter when I had served Mr. Oliver for two and a half years that he sent for me to the dining-room. The table was littered with the relics of the feast. George Summerway sat with one elbow leaning upon it, his chair skewed away, his legs sprawled out towards the fire. He was twirling a glass of port in one hand.
“Well, this is t’lad, is it?” he bellowed, as I stood timidly within the doorway. His face was flushed, and his curling black hair hung over his forehead. “Looks a skinny ’un to me.”
“He’s strong enough,” said Mr. Oliver quietly. “I’ve been talking to Mr. Summerway about your future, William.”
“Wants thee to go into t’cotton trade. Does that appeal to thee, lad?”
I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I stammered and blushed. The thing had been sprung on me too suddenly.
“We’ve taken him at a disadvantage, George,” said Mr. Oliver kindly. “I’ll talk to him about the idea.”
“Ay, an’ get him to learn to talk, too,” Summerway shouted, swigging down his port. “Tha’s got to shout in t’cotton trade. No place for dumb ninnies. And learn summat about figures, lad. Learn summat about figures, an’ then us’ll see.”
That was all at the moment, but throughout the rest of that winter and during the succeeding spring Mr. Oliver conscientiously bent his mind to teaching me “summat about figures.” I could feel that it was not a matter greatly to his taste. Often his hand would stray to some favourite volume, as though for once he would break the routine and diverge into paths more congenial. But he would put the book down with a sigh and take up a foolscap sheet ruled with cash lines.
We were occupied with this business of figures up to nine o’clock one May evening. It had been a beautiful day, and suddenly Mr. Oliver thrust away the work as though he were impatient with it. “That’ll do for tonight, William,” he said, and walked to the window to look out over the water-meadows towards the last flush of sunset that lingered in the sky. Then, as was his custom, he expressed his deepest emotion in a catchword. “The golden evening brightens in the west,” he murmured. “Good-night, William.”
“Good-night, sir,” I said.
The next morning Mr. Oliver was found dead in his bed.