A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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that had lost its horse, so a mail cart looked like a Regency curricle which had lost its horses and was being pushed back to the stables by human hands.
My pusher was called Lily. She was my first and last real nurse. I can remember everything about Lily without the aid of photographs; but the photographs confirm that she was what I thought she was, even at that early age, a very good-looking in a soppy kind of way, raven-haired, distinctly friendly girl with dark rings round her black eyes. I have already referred to her in another book, Love and War in the Apennines, but she has to be resurrected yet again for the purpose of this narrative.
Lily had been kitted out by my mother in what must have been a moment of social aspiration in full nurse’s rig. The winter outfit, navy-blue coat and a sort of pork-pie hat to match which she wore at a jaunty angle, was innocuous enough but the summer one was very different. It consisted of a short-sleeved blue-denim dress with starched white collar and cuffs, black silk stockings, high heels and a headdress made up of swathes of dark-blue veiling. Dressed in this outfit, a model girl’s idea of a W1 or SW1 nurse, with the veiling and the black-rimmed eyes, she looked like a mixture of a houri and nurse in a blue film. In London, W1, or SW1, where nurses, in fact, tended to be rather plain, if not hideous or of forbidding demeanour, she would have been very conspicuous and they would probably have driven her from Hyde Park, if she had attempted to enter it, into that desert where nurses whose charges did not appear in Debrett were sent to languish, Kensington Gardens. In Barnes, SW13, the total effect of the uniform, Lily and her soppy, friendly air could have been nothing less than inflammatory. I loved Lily but even then at that tender age I recognized that it was in a different way from anyone else who ever looked after me; and I think Lily loved me, but in a different way from the way in which I loved her. Thus, because of all this, in her company, as a sort of accomplice or accessory after the fact, because I could easily have told my mother what was going on, I found myself being trundled to assignations, only one or two of which I can remember fully, with what I recall as old men (which meant that they might have been twenty years old) and my mother recalled years later when I was fully grown as ‘dirty old men’ (which probably meant that they were over forty).
The venues for these presumed encounters, for I never remember seeing any actual goings-on, were the towing path above Hammersmith Bridge near Chiswick Ferry which was grassy and on which a number of bushes grew, and a creepy and now desecrated and presumably deconsecrated cemetery on Barnes Common. In it Lily kept me quiet while, again presumably she made rings around the tombs, by giving me handfuls of Carrara marble and other more brightly coloured chippings to play with. Some of these tomb chippings found their way into my bath where they were discovered by my mother. Subsequent sleuthing led to Lily being surprised by my mother, whether while being about to ‘do it’, or while actually in the act of ‘doing it’, or simply being chatted up, whether on the towing path or in the cemetery or at some other trysting place, she never made clear. Whatever or wherever it was, Lily was instantly dismissed, although this was not until some time towards the end of 1924, the year following the events which I am now narrating.
Whether it was in pursuit of whatever she was in pursuit of, or we were simply on a new, adventurous walk, on the afternoon on which the happenings which led up to my nightmare took place, Lily pushed me in the mail cart up the towing path from Hammersmith Bridge as far as Chiswick Ferry. The ferry was for foot passengers only, and when it functioned at all, which was rarely, they were conveyed across the river by a ferryman in a rowing-boat. Having reached the ferry, as she usually did, Lily turned left down a narrow, unmetalled lane between two reservoirs from which it was separated by iron railings. This lane led to Lonsdale Road, the road up which the police used to push the drunk and disorderly on their handcart to Barnes Police Station. At Lonsdale Road she normally turned left for Hammersmith Bridge and home along the pavements. But on this particular day instead of doing this she crossed Lonsdale Road and continued to follow the alignment of the lane into what was, for me, unknown territory.
It was an eerie place. To the left of the lane, which was also unmetalled, a rather dreary expanse of fields with a farmhouse on the edge of it, what must have been one of the nearest farms to central London, stretched away towards the semi-detached developments that but for the war would have already engulfed them, as they would shortly. In these flat fields, some distance off, a line of what looked like men but I later discovered when I was older were rough-looking women wearing cloth caps and sacks in lieu of aprons, worked away, bent double among the vegetables.
To the right of the road a rusty corrugated-iron fence, its top cut into cruel, jagged spikes and festooned with brambles and old man’s beard (an appropriate weed for Lily, perhaps, in the circumstances), separated it from the adjoining property, and along it a line of trees, possibly willows, with thick pollarded trunks grew, or rather rotted, for most of them were in the last stages of decay. The surface of the road was full of potholes with water in them, and in the ditches on either side was some of the detritus of civilization, what the French more expressively call ordures – broken lavatory pans, rusty oil drums, bits of bicycles and prams, broken shoes, awful items of discarded clothing, bundles of sodden newspaper, broken glass. It was certainly no place for a nanny and a small child in a mail cart. Some five years later, when I was at Colet Court (a London preparatory school), my favourite museum was the Imperial War Museum in South Kensington and there in the picture gallery I saw dozens of similar roads, only the potholes in the pictures were shell-holes and the trees had been shattered by gunfire, all painted by war artists on Flanders and other fields. It was therefore not surprising that when the fields were finally built over some years later and the lane became a respectable suburban road, whoever was in charge of naming roads in Barnes gave it the name it bears today, Verdun Road.
Against the largest and most decayed of these ruined trees a fire was burning, eating its way into the heart of it, and sitting close to the fire, although it was late afternoon it was still warm, were three of the hideous hags who, when the tide was right, slept up against the abutments under Hammersmith Bridge. And on the fire was an iron pot. It would have been impossible for anyone to say how old these creatures were. They were so blackened by smoke and smeared with filth that it was difficult to identify them as human beings. One of them was singing in a wild, tuneless mindless way and another was screeching at the third member of this ghastly triumvirate, while picking away like a monkey in her long, lank hair. The third one was tending the pot.
As we came abreast of them, the one who was looking for lice or nits in her companion’s hair (for that is what she must have been doing), got to her feet and came towards us with surprising swiftness, with her horrible discoloured stockings dragging around her ankles, mumbling something about ‘the baby’ between her broken teeth. It was too much for me and I began to bellow; and it was too much for Lily who kicked up her heels and fled, pushing the mail cart through the water-filled potholes which she had previously carefully skirted, so that it bounced up and down on its springs, soaking herself in the process.
She did not stop until she reached the corner of Madrid Road where we were once again on a real, made-up road and enclosed by comforting suburbia. By this time she had more or less succeeded in calming me down.
‘Horrible old thing,’ she said, ‘I thought she wanted to eat you up.’
And this not only set me off again but crystallized the dream so that it would always unfold in the same way: myself alone, forced by some irresistible power to walk along the lane with the sun sinking behind the corrugated-iron fence and the dying trees to the one where three cackling hags sit round a fire burning in the heart of it, preparing to make a cannibal feast of the infant Newby.
It was about this time that the tragic demise took place of Mrs George. Mrs George had been our cook/housekeeper since before I was born and it was to her that my mother used to pass on her copy of the Daily Mirror when she had done with it. When I was born she ceased to ‘live in’, arriving each morning before eight o’clock from where she lived, over the river in Hammersmith.
When she retired, early in 1923, she went to live in a house, so far as I can make out, in Glentham Road and continued to visit us. Glentham Road led down by what must have been one of the few hills in Barnes from Castelnau by the side of the reservoir from which the spray used to blow across the road. Mrs George was white-haired, fresh-complexioned, large