Tono-Bungay

ND MY MOTHER; AND THE

rse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal snacks-the unjustifiable gifts of

most incidental thing in my

ted to quite public occasions, nor at the other end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance with that dusty but attractive class of people who go about on the high-roads drunk but enfamille (so redeeming the minor lapse), in the summertime, with a perambulator, lavender to sell, sun-brown children, a smell, and ambiguous bundles that fire

n't done the who

range, this extensive cross-section of the British social org

ten years ago! Do you remember the days of Ponderevo, the great days, I mean, of Ponderevo? Perhaps you had a trifle in some world-shaking enterprise! Then you know him only too well. Astraddle on Tono-Bungay, he flashed athwart the e

llions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps, two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in upon, but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white heats and hamme

ive at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too, such as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who are really no more than peopl

glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is never still for the clang and thunder of machin

eories formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life-as one man has found it. I want to tell-MYSELF, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and lured and s

hatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a constr

ethod in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further delay

I

tle boy I took the place with the entirest faith as a complete authentic microcosm. I believed that

d give you th

and multitudes of fallow deer. The house was built in the eighteenth century, it is of pale red brick in the style of a French chateau, and save for one pass among the crests which opens to blue distances, to minute, remote, oast-set farm-houses and copses and wheat fields and the occasional gleam of water, its hundred and seventeen windows look on nothing but its own wide and handsome territories. A semi-circular screen of great beeches masks the church and village, which cluster picturesquely about the high ro

and lived and were permitted. And the Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's room and warren of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforced these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me

hat in i

aces for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country town where the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewo

till, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the English countryside-you can range through Kent from Bladesover northward and see persists obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The

glish mind. But what IS coming into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our people never formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the meanwhile the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing still, sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my mother had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay. It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come to things wit

his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still thought he knew his place-and mine. I did not know him, but I would have liked de

been gaily full of fops, of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with swords; and when there was no company they spent whole days in the corner parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used always to think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living, like God, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of reality without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I saw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery (where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I was u

that none of the company were really Lady Drew's equals, they were greater and lesser after the manner of all things in our world. Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in attendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and excited us all, and perhaps raise

n upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state

eenth century literature is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to share the pie. He rose above these indignities because of the abundance of younger sons. When I meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I am apt to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England village Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth century parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the "vet," artists and

, chintz-brightened housekeeper's room where the upper servants assembled, or of footmen and Rabbits and estate men of all sorts among the green baize and Windsor chairs of the pantry-where Rabbits, being above the law, sold be

er's room; there was another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a new peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in the anomalous apartment that held the upper servants' bagatelle board and in which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets. And if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Prince of Battenberg was related to

concealed my father-and in some details mine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her saying now, "No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom." Sh

rs ago; that it has had Reform Acts indeed, and such-like changes of formula, but no essential revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, either impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually in the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after lost orientations. We have

more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fer

ier. Every year Lady Drew gave them an invitation-a reward and encouragement of virtue with especial reference to my mother and Miss Fison, the maid. They sat about

nce. She had been maid to the widow of Sir Roderick Blenderhasset Impey, some sort of governor or such-like portent in the East Indies, and from her remains-in Mrs. Mackridge-I judge Lady Impey was a very stupendous and crushing creature indeed. Lady Impey had been of the Juno type, haughty, unapproachable, given to irony and a caustic wit. Mrs. Mackridge had no wit, but she had acquired the caustic voice a

Fison, the maid who served both Lady Drew and Miss Somerville, and at the end of the table opposite my mother, sat Rabbits the butler. Rabbits, for a butler, was an unassuming man, and at tea he was not as you know butlers, but in a morning coat and a black tie with blue spots. Still, he was large, with side whiskers, even if his clean-shaven mouth was weak and little. I sat among these people on a

n hour, and I sat it out perforce; and da

ckridge?" my mo

rs. Latud

egin, issuing her proclamation-at least half her sentences began "they say"-"

a, ma'am," said Ra

s. Mackridge, with an air of

ey say next?"

uch things!" s

ge, inflexibly, "the doctors

er: "No

ridge: "N

ore he died, consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I

gloom of manner and a pause was considere

y mother, "don't

re drawing out nicely," she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw i

ider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in

to the longest or shortest day would

ould at times tackle that sheet, but only to read the births, marriages, and deaths on the front page. It was, of course, the old Morning Po

Mr. Rabbits

ousin?" She knew he was; it was an entirely irrelevan

ay popular in New South Wales. They looked up to him greatlay. I

de of r

odel a precise emphatic articulation without acquiring at the same tim

ackridge, scornful

ame back, and I remember them talki

s. Mackridge,

for their country's good,'-which in some way was took to remind them of their being origin

"and the Second Thing"-here she fixed me again-"and the Third Thing"-now I was released-"needed in a colonial governor is Tact."

Tact growing up in my soul, I would tear it ou

ws, some of 'em. Very respectful of course, free with their money in a spasammy sort of way, but-Some of 'em, I must confes

she turned her mind in that direction my errant father might suddenly and shockingly be discovered, no doubt c

in my heart at Mrs. Mackridge's colonial ascendancy. These brave emancipated sunburnt English of the o

r now. I'm

stances to do, and take my world for granted. A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and a certain in

ust inherit something of the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every little personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents made by him as a lover, for example-books with kindly inscriptions, letters perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage. She kept her wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed. She never told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of him-it isn't much-I g

pose that between ten and fourteen I av

itically on hens and pigs.... About that park there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there was mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the belling of stags, came upon young fawns am

bout 1780, by means of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable people attired in pagodas-I say it deliberately, "pagodas." There were Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large, incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet had been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion of their character. So

ilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the old head-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of Plato's "Republic" then, and found ex

ings back with it my boyish memor

d Romulus and Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over the one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; and over the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan deities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers

id was one of extraor

count. Ann located, came a dash across the open space at the foot of that great staircase that has never been properly descended since powder went out of fashion, and so to the saloon door. A beast of an oscillating Chinaman in china, as large as life, grimaced and quivered to one's lightest

t I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive f

upposed to stand in need of schools, and our middle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools, schools any unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept by a man who had had the energy to get himself a College of Pre

s tough at any rate-and several of us were the sons of London publicans, who distinguished "scraps" where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts. Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching wa

h world, with its low broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat, its oasts and square church towers, its background of downland and hangers, has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of its beauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper "boyish" things to do; we never "robbed an orchard" for example, though there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was sinful, we stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fields indeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and afterwards we were ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but they were natural accidents, our own adventures. There was one hot day when several of us, walking out towards Maidstone, were incited by the devil to despise ginger beer, and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our young minds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend of the Wild West. Young Roots fro

s, and our best game, I say it with pride, I invented. I got it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a wood where "Trespassing" was forbidden, and did the "Retreat of the Ten Thousand" through it from end to end, cutting our way bravely through a host of nettle beds that barred our path, and not forgetting to weep and kneel when at last we emerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times, weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the part of that distinguished general Xenophen-and please note the quantity of the o. I have all my

as he has to-day, the same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative moment, the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository touch all things became m

friends. We merged our intellectual stock so completely that I wonder sometimes how

I

assed my fourteenth birthda

and it was through the Honourable Beatrice Normandy. She

Women. She came into the old nursery upstairs, and every day she had tea with us in the housekeeper's r

overcame. She conveyed she was "under orders"-like a Greek tragedy. She was that strange product of the old time, a devoted, trusted servant; she had, as it were, banked all her pride and will with the greater, more powerful people who employed her, in return for a life-long security of servitude-the bargain was nonetheless binding for being implicit. Finally they were to pension her, and she would die the hated treasure of a boarding-house. She had built up in herself an enormo

s you would miss in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark ha

about the park and the village that they told every one, and Beatrice watched m

left a question of my mother's disregarde

Nannie. "He's M

ant boy?" rep

oolboy," sa

talk to hi

"You mustn't talk too much," she said to he

cisively, as Beatr

fiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said, stabbing

e with hate and a passionate desire to compel her to admire me.... And the next day before tea,

variety of kitten. I had never had anything to do with a little girl before, I thought she was more beautiful and wonderful and bright than anything else could possibly be in life, and she found me the gentlest of slaves-though at the same time, as I made evident, fairly strong. And Nannie was amazed to find the afternoon slip cheerfully and rapidly away. She praised my manners to Lady Drew and to my mother, who said she was glad to hear well of me, and after that I played with Beatrice several

Ewart to talk to me of love; and I made a great story out of the doll's house, a story

privately decided,

nough my memory of that second holiday in which she played a pa

I

r half-brother quite a number of times in my last holiday at Bladesover, but I really cannot recall more than a little of the quality of the circumstances. That great crisis of my boyhood stands out very vividly as an effect, as a sort of cardinal thing for me, but when I look for details, particularly details that led up to the crisis-I cannot find them in any

our, its fine furniture, its large traditions, was entirely at the old lady's disposition; and I am inclined to think it is true that she used this fact to torment and dominate a number of eligible people. Lord Osprey was among the number of these, and she showed these hospitalities to his motherless child and step-child, partly, no doubt, because he was poor, but quite as much, I nowadays imagine, in the dim hope of finding some affectionate or imaginative outcome

way, in love with me. It is part of the decent and useful pretences of our world that children of the age at which we were, think nothing, feel nothing, know nothing of love.

have seen the sweet imp as I remember her. Just her poise on the wall comes suddenly clear before me, and behind her the light various branches of the bushes of the shrubbery that my feet might not profane, and fa

f nothing; and then in a whisper, leaning forw

ing to have it clear that I was

er be a ser

dily, and it is a vow

l you be?

hastily over t

e a soldier

rs? No fear!" said I. "Lea

an of

said, evading a sh

r go into

you like

no honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked d

ed at me doubtfully; and the spaces o

poor men went into the navy; that I "knew" mathematics, which no army officer did; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and sp

egregious governess became audible, c

d to get on with the conversation; but

; and I went very close to her, and she put her little head d

ed in a whisper, her warm flushed face near tou

, faithful lover,

lips and we kissed, and boy though I was, I was

-trice!" fea

t after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess, and explai

and so to love-dreams and single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken valleys that varied

nowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And somehow-I don't remember what led to it at all-I and Beatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather; the stems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led the w

long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don't know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discuss

d; "we can't

have

u aren't. And you can't play Beatrice

id, and lo

been in Archie's mind. "We let you play with us,"

Beatrice. "He c

angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still discussing play

to play with us a

do," said

s aitches li

said I, in the h

he cried. "E, he

to a finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting and enduring savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn't fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two other

eciation, but I was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly backed us both, and

still following the tradition of my class and school, promptly flung myself on him to finish h

ou FOOL!" s

ice cry. "They're fighting! Th

to get up became irresistible, and my res

hill easily, and so had come upon us. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly.

een fighting?"

e been f

ing," snapped Archie, w

ss Somerville, so adding a conviction f

" cried Lady Drew,

ing for breath. "I slipped, and-he hit

ou DARE?" sa

d wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no explanation of my dar

ight fair,"

age to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me. That woul

Bladesover made an extr

e, conscience stricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth, from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her

w's decisions were, in the light of t

subordination than Lady Drew. She dilated on her ladyship's kindnesses to me, on the effrontery and wickedness of my

don," I said, speaki

paused, in

delivered my wicked little ultimatum. "I

to go off to your un

go or what I have to do, I w

I di

e pity for me, but she did not show it. She took the side of the young gentleman; she

dn't e

Jukes the coachman, coldly silent, driving me, and all my pe

Honourable Beatrice Normandy should have repudiated and fled from me as though I was some sort of leper, and not even have taken a chance or so, to give me

esover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not re

sorry for pounding young Garvell