A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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Carso, and smeared it with cow dung.
When we got tired of driving our car we ourselves used to become motor cars, tearing up and down the street outside making BRRR-ing noises of varying intensity as we changed gear, disturbing the elderly ladies who used to sit at their cottage doors making Honiton lace, pillow lace, appliqué and guipure, the principal manufacture of the village. Close by, over the hill at Beer where there were stone quarries, the quarry men’s wives had made the lace for Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1839, something that was still talked about in the neighbourhood more or less as if it had happened yesterday. It was these hideous BRRR-ing noises that no doubt prompted old Mrs Bamford, whose cottage also faced the main street, to utter the words, ‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im.’
But all this was in the future, that first day of our holiday.
The next morning I woke at what must have been an early hour and, obeying some mysterious summons, dressed myself in the clothes that I had worn the previous afternoon – white shirt, shorts, socks and white sun hat (I couldn’t manage the tie unaided), brown lace-up shoes from Daniel Neal’s in Kensington High Street (soon to be replaced by hobnail boots, bought for me at my earnest request so that I could be a real country boy, which took me ages to tie) and my pride and joy, a hideous red and green striped blazer with brass buttons that I had persuaded my mother to buy for me, much against her will, from Messrs Charles Baker, Outfitters, of King Street, Hammersmith, so that I should look more like what I described as ‘a real schoolboy’ rather than an infant member of the kindergarten at the Froebel School in Baron’s Court. As school blazers were not made to fit persons as small as I was, when I was wearing it my short trousers were scarcely visible at all. Not even Messrs Baker appeared to know which school it was, if any, that had red and virulent green stripes as its colours. Then, having picked up a stout stick that I had acquired the previous day, I stole downstairs and let myself out into the village street which was deserted as it was Sunday morning.
At the side of the road, opposite what I was soon to know as Mrs Hutchings’s shop, a little stream purled down from one of the side valleys, one of several such streams that, united, reach the sea at Branscombe Mouth; and there, under a brick arch, it issued from a pipe which supplied this lower end of the village with water, before burrowing under the road to reappear once more outside the shop. From here it ran away downhill over stones along the edge of a little lane with an old, ivy-clad wall on one side of it, chattering merrily to itself as it ran over the stones in a way that seemed almost human.
Here, in this narrow lane, the water had what looked to me like watercress growing in it, and it was so clear and delicious-looking that I got down and had a drink of it, only to find that it was not delicious at all and that it had a nasty smell. Later I discovered that Betty Hutchings used to drink from this crystal stream if she was not watched which was probably the reason why she sweated like a bull.
I continued to follow the stream, racing twigs down it, until it vanished into a sort of tunnel from which proceeded a delightful roaring sound. At the other end it emerged beyond a wicket gate to flow more placidly under a little bridge and in these calmer waters I spent some time stirring up the bottom with my stick and frightening some water beetles, the air about me filled with the droning of innumerable insects.
From this point it ran to join the main stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse.
At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings’s shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it.
Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith’s shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail.
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’
Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back.
There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?’ she said. ‘Your mum’s ever so worried, and your dad, too. He’ll be ever so cross if he finds out where you’ve been. You’d better keep quiet when you get back. I’ll say I found you in the field.’
Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service.
CHAPTER SEVEN Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith
In the autumn of 1928 I was sent to Colet Court, the Junior School of St Paul’s which stood opposite it in the Hammersmith Road. By a quirk similar (but not the same) to that which locates Harrods in SW1, when everything else in Knightsbridge is in SW3, Colet Court was in Hammersmith W6 and St Paul’s in West Kensington W14.
As if to emphasize the connection between the two schools the architect or architects, who were obsessed with this material, had embellished both sets of buildings, which were constructed of purple brick, with what seemed like acres of shiny, orange terracotta. A large part of my schooldays were spent in these disturbing surroundings, which suggested some more restrictive uses than seats of learning, and it was quite common for boys waiting outside St Paul’s in the evening for a bus to take them home to be approached by some stranger, often a foreigner, wishing to know what kind of ‘institution’ was this enormous pile of Victorian Gothic in the Hammersmith Road, and of what sort were the inmates. Eventually, after some exceptionally earnest or morbid sightseer, wishing to see and know more, had enquired at the porter’s lodge, an order was promulgated to the effect that when such a question was posed by a member of the public we were forbidden to say that the place was a ‘loony bin’.
A photograph probably taken in 1929, in the summer term of my first year at Colet Court, shows me, at least after the extensive retouching to which it had been subjected, to have been a healthy, cheerful-looking boy with large, protruding ears and a large mouth full of very slightly protruding teeth.
Because my ears stuck out (whichever ear I slept on flapped over on itself, like an envelope) at night when I went to bed I was made to wear what were called ear-caps. They were made of cotton, had what looked like miniature