A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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from my mother, very pompous Harley Street gynaecologist to be out, summoned from his residence in Hampstead to this distant and unfashionable address at 2 a.m. by my father, using the telephone which he had had installed expressly for this contingency. On the other hand, it could have been colder. At 4 a.m. the thermometer at Kensington Palace, a couple of miles away on the other side of Hammersmith Bridge, registered a temperature well above freezing in the 40s Fahrenheit.
This ‘specialist’ subsequently performed an operation on my mother so incompetently and, so far as there was any possibility of her having any more children, so definitively, that years later the operation became the subject of a highly critical article in one of the medical periodicals in which my mother was referred to as Mrs N and the surgeon as Mr X, by which time he was dead and beyond the processes of the Law. That night he travelled to Barnes in what my father described to me when I was old enough to be curious about the circumstances of my birth as ‘an electric brougham’.
The driver of such a machine sat outside, perched high up on a box, fully exposed to the elements – which would have been necessary if he had been driving a horse – while the passengers were accommodated in its leather upholstered and buttoned interior in considerable comfort. And, in fact, the effect produced by one of these contraptions, which looked as if its horse had bolted without it but was still moving forward by the force of gravity, steered by its gloomy, peak-capped driver with a wheel on a vertical column (gloomy because for most of his life he had probably driven horse-drawn broughams and regarded this development as an affront to nature), was highly comical. And when I eventually travelled in an electric brougham, aged five, on a night of thick pea soup fog and torrential rain in December 1924, from my grandparents’ house in Winchester Street, Pimlico, back to Hammersmith Bridge, with my mother and father and an uncle and aunt, all warm and dry and full of food inside, while the driver was drenched with rain and half asphyxiated by fog on the outside, I laughed till I cried, all the way shrieking, ‘He hasn’t got a lid on!’
It was my mother, who was in a position to feel the full force of the specialist’s grumpiness, who told me about it. However, why he was grumpy when he was being paid so highly for something he had contracted to do, and was treated to whisky on his arrival and champagne on my arrival, as well as chicken sandwiches, is not clear. Presumably the nature of his job must have accustomed him to working at odd hours, like lighthouse keepers and policemen. His grumpiness, however, was as nothing compared with that of another telephone subscriber to whose number my father was connected in error before getting through to the specialist, the work of one of the operators at the Hammersmith Exchange, whose fruity ‘SORRRYY YOU’VE BEEN TRRROUBBLED!’ did nothing to convince the wretched man, dragged from his bed at two in the morning, that anyone was sorry at all.
It would not have been much of a night for the homeless poor, their clothes stuffed with newspaper, who slept rough on the towing path down by the river all through my early childhood, and who would certainly have been there that night. Most of them were regulars. Some were terrifying-looking women; some were ‘tramps’, the first ‘real’ travellers I can remember seeing, pointed out by my nurse. But not many of them would have been tramps because most tramps were too solicitous of their personal comfort to share the appallingly draughty, unspeakably filthy but more or less rain-proof camping place used by these unfortunate outcasts, up against the reeking abutments under Hammersmith Bridge, only about fifty yards from where, a boisterous baby, I was now giving tongue. But on this particular night with a high spring tide some time after midnight (high water at London Bridge was at 12.12 a.m.) their pitch would have been a couple of feet under water for an hour or more, and they would have been sleeping among the bushes down towards Putney, or up against the trunks of the huge black poplar trees that grew along the towing path opposite Chiswick Mall further upstream to which normal spring tides did not reach.
Some of these men and women drank methylated spirits. If they became violent, they were ‘taken into custody’ by the police. This usually meant that a couple of unfortunate constables, sometimes one alone, had to strap the prisoner, male or female, who by this time would probably be striking out, biting and scratching, to a handcart and then wheel it a mile or more up Lonsdale Road from the Boileau Arms, which everyone called, and still calls, ‘Ther Boiler’, to Barnes Police Station with the occupant roaring loudly enough to wake the dead. If more than one person had to be taken into custody, a Black Maria was sent for.
When it dawned, the day was even more rumbustious than the night. And when the sun rose, just before eight o’clock, like the moon, it remained invisible. Thunderstorms visited many parts of the country, accompanied by hail, sleet or snow and west or north-westerly winds which reached gale force in high places. In Lincolnshire, the Belvoir Hunt, having ‘chopped a fox’ in Foston Spinney (seized it before it fairly got away from cover), ‘were hunting another from Allington when scent was totally swept away by a tremendous rainstorm’.
‘Flying Prospects’ on my birthday were not good, according to The Times. It is now difficult to imagine that a pilot, or even a passenger, might actually buy a newspaper in order to find out whether it was safe to ‘go up’, but it must have been so, otherwise there would have been no point in publishing the information at all. ‘Unsuitable for aviation or fit only for short distance flying by the heaviest sort of machine’ was what the communiqué said. ‘Sea Passages’ were equally disagreeable. The English Channel was rough, with winds reaching forty miles an hour, and there was extensive flooding in France.
But if the weather was disturbed that Saturday, it was as nothing compared with the state of great chunks of Europe and northern Asia. In spite of the fact that the advertising department of The Times had chosen this particular Saturday to announce ‘PRESENTS SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, on it Latvians were fighting Germans, on whom they had declared war a week previously on 28 November, and so were the Lithuanians. In Russia, on the Don and between Voronezh and Kirsk and in Asia, beyond the Urals, along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, where typhus was raging, Bolsheviks and White Russians were engaged in a civil war of the utmost ferocity. Meanwhile, that same Saturday, while their fellow countrymen were destroying one another, with their country in ruins and becoming every day more ruinous, Lenin and Trotsky and the 1109 delegates of the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed a resolution to the effect that ‘The Soviet Union Desires to Live in Peace with All Peoples’. On that day, too, Lenin told the Congress that ‘Communistic Principles were being utterly disregarded by the Russian peasantry.’
That day, too, much nearer home, while I was taking my first nourishment, as it were, in the open air, French Army units with heavy guns were rumbling across the Rhine bridges in order to force the Germans to ratify the peace treaty which they had signed at Versailles in June; and in the same issue of The Times which carried the headline about ‘THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, there were other headlines such as ‘GUNS ACROSS THE RHINE’ and ‘WAR IMMINENT’, although who was to fight another war with millions killed and wounded, armies in a state of semi-demobilization, and millions more dying or soon to die from sickness and starvation was not clear. Nevertheless, that weekend, the only thing, theoretically, that stood between the protagonists and another outbreak of war, was the Armistice, signed in a French railway carriage parked in a wood, thirteen months previously, so that, equally theoretically, it would simply have meant carrying on with the old one. That weekend, too, the Americans quitted the peace conference.
There was, altogether, a lot about death in the papers that Saturday. It was as if Death the Reaper, an entity embodied by cartoonists in their drawings as a hideous, skeletal figure, and it would have been difficult to have lived through the last five years without thinking of death as such, had become dissatisfied with his efforts, had once again sharpened his scythe and was already cutting fresh, preliminary swathes through the debilitated populations of the vanquished powers, as if the great influenza epidemic, which reached its peak in Britain in March 1919, and which altogether killed more people in Europe than all the shot and shell of four and a half years of war, had not been enough.
In Britain, that Saturday, things were rather different. Bank rate was six per cent, exports were booming. On Friday, the US dollar closed at $3.90 to the pound. The only disquieting news that morning, and that was more or less a rumour, was that there was a possibility of a number of pits being forced to