A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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cricket bats, or even school satchels would do if they were sufficiently packed with books, to bash the boys with. Otherwise the only thing to do was to run for it: capture meant torture, even if it was only of an improvised, not very refined sort, which it more or less had to be in an open street. (At Colet Court, where there were places hidden from view in the playground, to which few masters ever penetrated, torture could mean having drawing pins pushed into the palms of one’s hands.) Even so, we sometimes arrived at school, ourselves blubbing, with bloody noses and straw hats stove in and, worst of all, late, in which case we were reported. It is perhaps not surprising that when things got really bad we took to crossing Hammersmith Broadway by the forbidden route.
However, these misfortunes were soon forgotten travelling home to Ther Boiler in the evenings on top of a No. 9 or 73 open bus, bombarding other boys on the tops of other buses with peashooters or squirting water pistols at them; whistling at the girls from St Paul’s Girls’ School, with whom social intercourse while travelling was discouraged; hiding under the canvas covers, which could be put up over the seats in wet weather, to avoid paying the fare; or better still, waiting for the buses of the Westminster or Premier pirate bus companies, that were fighting a battle for survival against the London General Omnibus Company. Their drivers used to shoot ahead of the sedate red Generals at a tremendous rate and scoop up all the customers, so that, when the Generals arrived, which had to observe a time schedule, the passengers were already half way home. The pirates had no ticket inspectors to speak of, and often their conductors used to let schoolchildren ride free.
But these early back street encounters were as nothing compared with the risks one ran when one was older and was required to wear the ludicrous uniform decreed at St Paul’s – black jacket, striped trousers, stiff white collar, black tie. In winter, boys who had attained a certain height wore bowler hats and carried rolled umbrellas.
These last two items, although they conferred a certain, barely tangible, status on those who wore them in the company of their fellow Paulines, had the reverse effect on those wearing them all alone, for example in the Hammersmith Bridge Road.
By this time, aged fifteen or so, it did not matter whether I went to school by way of Hammersmith Broadway or the back street route wearing such an outfit. There were just as many possibilities of being elbowed, tripped or jeered at on the bridge itself (a nasty place for ‘an encounter’), or in the Hammersmith Bridge Road, by what I now recognized were no longer schoolboys but semi-grown men. I now walked to school from choice, finding it too much of a bore to queue up for a bus at Ther Boiler in what was always the rush hour when I set out.
Although the penalty for not wearing a hat, whether a bowler, a school cap or a straw hat, was quite severe (a beating usually administered by a prefect), I preferred at this age to be beaten rather than draw attention to myself by wearing any of these sorts of headgear, just as by this time I was prepared to risk punishment for talking with girls I knew from St Paul’s Girls’ School on their way home by bus, some of whom also removed their hats but for a different reason – because they were good-looking and did not want to look like schoolgirls.
The only good thing about this crazy outfit was the umbrella. Less lethal than a cricket bat (with which if you hit someone really hard you might easily kill him), the umbrella, used as one would use a rifle with a bayonet or as an outsize truncheon, rather like those carried by the mounted police, was an ideal weapon.
Uncivilized as my behaviour may seem today, in a more squeamish but much more dangerous age, I can only plead that I had no choice. The penalty of defeat or, even worse, capture, would have been by this time much more serious than anything I experienced at Colet Court.
As a result of this misuse, my umbrella and those of my schoolfellows who found themselves in similar situations soon became useless for the purpose for which they were intended, either failing to open when it rained and they were needed, or else opening and falling to pieces.
These journeys from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the streets of Hammersmith altogether continued for eight years of my life (not including the period when, as a small child, I attended the Froebel kindergarten in Baron’s Court). In me they engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger and despair that some nineteenth-century travellers experienced in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the Central Highlands of New Guinea. And even today and now with even more reason, I sometimes experience a chilly sensation when walking alone down a narrow south London street.
CHAPTER EIGHT Lands and Peoples
Up to now the reader may feel, and with some justification, that my travels have been of a somewhat parochial nature. By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.
This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.
What distinguished Lands and Peoples from other similar publishing ventures was that it was illustrated with colour photographs. ‘Marvellous as photography is, in one sense it has failed,’ the editor wrote. ‘The colour photograph is a dream … Here it is that the bold idea of Lands and Peoples has succeeded beyond all expectations. What Science has failed to do, Art has done … Some seven hundred photographs from all over the world have been coloured by artists from original sources, so that they become actual photographs with colour true to life, a remarkable anticipation of the final triumph of the camera that will show the world as it really is, in all its glow of red and green and gold.’ It was no hollow claim. The colours were in fact more true to life than those produced from much of the colour film in use today.
What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box at Three Ther Mansions, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.
Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly,