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This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur – and of their sons, in whom are invested their fathers’ hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O’Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers’ lofty plans have unexpected consequences as the violence of the Irish Revolution sweeps them all into uncharted territory.
For Eric Hiscock
A few men and women who have played some part in the history of our times are mentioned in this novel. These apart, all characters are fictitious and all scenes are imaginary.
And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
Cover
Welcome Page
About My Son, My Son
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part III
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part IV
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part V
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
About Howard Spring
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
William Essex rises from humble beginnings to become a successful dramatist and novelist. We get to know him rather well: he is the narrator of this novel. His friend Dermot O’Riorden, a reluctant Irish patriot, a talented joiner, founds a leading London furnishing emporium. When they first meet, both poor and aspiring, O’Riorden is ‘sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window’. They become close friends, pouring out their hearts to one another. O’Riorden calls Ireland ‘a stinking, starving little country that I’m glad to be out of’; but he also says, ‘If ever I have a son […] I’ll dedicate him to Ireland’.
My Son, My Son – William’s and Dermot’s story – belongs equally to their sons, Oliver Essex and Rory O’Riorden. The boys grow up as friends in their father’s shadows but, emerging into their own light, the very history that their parents have managed to circumvent lays hold of them. Fathers whose best-laid plans were for their sons, have no power to deliver them from their plans’ consequences. Oliver and Rory are their Absaloms. Fathers provide, counsel, watch, regret, but cannot prevent. Of the mature women characters, only Livia Vaynol, a free and freeing spirit who arrives too late, gives the novel a romantic focus.
When it first appeared in 1938 the novel was entitled O Absalom! Two years before its publication, William Faulkner’s masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! was published. My Son, My Son! kept only the repetition and, initially at least, the exclamation mark. Spring’s and Faulkner’s fathers could hardly be more unalike. If the books share themes – civil conflict, family, material, cultural and political ambition – they are worlds apart in form, texture and tone. Faulkner is a self-inventing modernist; Spring a social novelist in the English line of Eliot, Meredith and Hardy.
1937 had been a good year for English fiction. On publication, Spring’s book succeeded John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men on the bestseller list and outsold Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in its first year. Both these books have retained the limelight better than My Son, My Son and have not been out of print, where My Son, My Son’s hour has come and gone and come again as its themes return to topicality. In 1940 it was made into a feature film in the United States – where the book was extremely popular – directed by Charles Vidor and foregrounding the romantic themes. In 1979 it became an eight-episode BBC television series exploring the Irish dimension. Kate Binchy played Sheila O’Riorden, Frank Grimes Dermot and Gerard Murphy was Rory; Michael Williams was William and Patrick Ryecart Oliver. The two treatments are totally different, yet the book contains them both.
Howard Spring is a city novelist. Born and reared in poverty in Cardiff, his poverty is not rural but urban, of the slums. His is not Gaskell, Galt or Hardy territory. He has more in common with the worlds of Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, writers whom he succeeded as an influential book reviewer at the Evening Standard.
The early chapters of My Son, My Son are set in and around my home town, Manchester. His first novel, Shabby Tiger (1934) is also set there. The locations – Deansgate, St Anne’s Square, Palatine Road, even the Old Cock Inn – still recognizably survive. ‘All the way from Ancoats to Hulme there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a twig to be seen.’ Things have improved a little, but his world is familiar in outline. The action takes place a century ago, but the map of Manchester and its suburbs has not much changed. Many old buildings still stand, now put to different uses, or derelict and awaiting rehabilitation or the wrecker’s ball. Hulme, where the protagonist endures his threadbare childhood and his mother works as a laundress, is improved but recognizable. The winter streets can still be ‘full of writhing yellow fog’. Grey laundry hangs on lines, bullies are busy bullying, straitened families sprawl and multiply; ‘there was a funeral now and then to thin us out’. Some once-posh neighbourhoods have come down in the world, but Didsbury today is still Spring’s Didsbury, a place to aspire to.
Nellie Moscrop, whom William decides early on in his climb out of poverty to marry ‘in cold blood’, having realized how sick and how rich her father is, draws William’s attention to the Manchester novels and writers. Jane Eyre ‘began to get written not ten minutes’ walk from here’, and Mrs Linnaeus Banks’s The Manchester Man was also local produce. William heeds her, but even then realises that the he is in transit through these streets that are like ‘a small frozen furrow in the waste of the city’, and that the people he uses to rise by he will eventually leave behind – apart from his intimate friend Dermot who rises in a different way and place. The narrator’s candour is reliable and unnerving: he is without moral scruple, which makes time’s judgement on him seem less gratuitous, more just.
William is attuned to social division. Having begun in poverty, he works and calculates his way out of it. His first job, in the novel’s first sentence, is fetching washing for his washerwoman mother. He notices the differences between her clients; some considerate, others brusque. A knowledge of social division pervades the novel, a division based less on social class than on material possession. And William becomes increasingly aware of political division, between Britain and Ireland. Spring is a spare writer, his descriptive writing conveying a kind of uninsistent symbolism. The story moves forward in the characters’ time and the country’s history. The little details are telling: whether a jam roll, Flynn’s narrative of the Manchester Martyrs, or William’s mother’s funeral procession. Spring’s London is less real than his Manchester, and when he writes Cornwall he has travelled a little too deep into Du Maurier country, leaving the real map behind.
Actual incidents and public figures tie the fictional elements to history. Spring insists on the reality of his novel. If someone leaves the action he will tell us – don’t imagine they’ll be back again. They leave for good, the way people do, the way things happen. He insists there is no design: this is life, plain and simple. The Irish home rule versus independence argument is conducted with increasing emphasis – Dermot’s ‘God damn England’ becomes Sheila’s ‘God bless Ireland’ – until we are in the heat of it. As if it was the book’s specific prophesy, in 1996 its themes came to fruition in the huge IRA bomb that stunned Manchester city centre.
One aspect of Spring’s realism was his commercial calculation. He dedicated the book to Eric Hiscock, author of the influential ‘Whitefriar’ column for Smith’s Trade News, the source of information for the book world. Hiscock had a nose for bestsellers. His endorsement could make a book’s fortune. Commercial calculation may have been on Spring’s mind. It is always on William’s mind as he climbs the social ladder and acquires the trappings of affluence. In a way, William is the prototype for the modern writer: a servant to his readers and his interests, knowing which side his bread is buttered on, and lacking the devil-may-care integrity that marks Hardy’s and Eliot’s protagonists. This corruption of artistic ambition is what the novel is about. It is an excellent novel because it makes no scruple in laying bare its narrator’s existential compromise and the consequences it has.
Michael Schmidt, 2016
I liked fetching the washing from the Moscrops’, and my mother liked washing for Mrs. Moscrop better than for anybody else. That was because Mrs. Moscrop always wrapped a bar of yellow soap in with the washing. There wasn’t anyone else who thought of a thing like that.
The Moscrops’ shop stood on a corner. The frontage was on the main road. To reach the bakehouse at the back you went down the side-street. The shop window looked very gay that night, especially as the streets were full of writhing yellow fog. It was a few days of Christmas. Chinese lanterns, some in long concertina shapes, some spherical, all lit with candles, reinforced the two gas jets which normally lighted the window. There was a long brass tube running the length of the window with half a dozen gas points sprouting from it like nipples, but only one at either end was ever lit. I suppose the Moscrops, like the rest of us in Hulme, had to think of pennies.
But that idea didn’t occur to me then. Moscrops’ was an oasis of light in the dingy slum, a lounging-place and rendezvous of the boys and girls, and on that particular night, with holly stuck into the tops of cakes, with coloured paper chains dangling in loops from one Chinese lantern to another, with “A Merry Christmas” hanging in separate silver letters from a string that was itself sparkling as though with hoar frost, Moscrops’ looked as enchanting a window as a child could wish. There were loaves covered with crisp brown crust, buns oozing currants, Christmas puddings, cloth-covered, in basins, tall jars of biscuits, and bottles of sweets.
When I pushed open the door, a bell above it gave one unresonant sound, more of a click than a ring, and there I was with the raw night shut out, the familiar, warm, foody smell all about me. Mrs. Moscrop, squat and rounded and friendly as one of her own cottage loaves, came in from the parlour behind the shop. “Oh, the washing!” she said. “It’s not quite ready. Just go and talk to Mr. Moscrop in the bakehouse.”
I went down the side-street and pushed open the bakehouse door. A lovely place! Lovelier even than the shop, warmer, more filled with appetising smells. Two deal tables ran down the length of it. They were as smooth as silk. Old Moscrop, shuffling about in slippers, with no coat or waistcoat, with his shirt-sleeves rolled high up and with a long white apron tied about his middle, looked as though he had been born in the place. His face was as creamy and pudgy as dough. All the rest of him was covered by a fine white film of flour. The door of the great oven was open, and I could see into its cavernous depths. Row upon row of loaves was within, some in tins, some standing in the brown armour of their crust. Mr. Moscrop had a wooden spade with an enormously long handle. With this he could reach right to the back of the oven. Sliding the blade under the loaves, he began to draw them out and put them on the two long deal tables. Some were for Mr. Moscrop’s shop and delivery round. Others had been baked for customers who made up their own dough at home. Fanciful people pricked their initials into the top of the dough. Others wrote their names on pieces of paper and skewered them on to the loaves with matchsticks. These pieces of paper were now brown and brittle and would fall to bits if you touched them.
Mr. Moscrop cast an eye at me now and then, but he did not speak till all the loaves were on the tables. Then he pulled towards him a long jam roll, took up a knife, struck off an inch or two and pushed it towards me. In a voice as hoarse as though his throat were choked with flour, he said: “’Ave a pennorth.”
The ritual was unfailing. The washing was never ready. I was always sent to the bakehouse. Mr. Moscrop always invited me to have a pennorth. Then I went back to the shop.
But now my heart gave a thump. Two boys were standing outside the window. I knew they would still be there when I came out. They were. I was burdened with that monstrous bundle, the week’s washing of the Moscrop family assembled inside a sheet, with the four corners of the sheet tied together. I gripped the knot thus made with both hands. Only so could I carry the load, bending forward to allow it to rest on my bowed back. I was twelve years old, very thin and weak, and very much afraid of the two boys who, I knew, were following me. Presently they passed me at a light run, one in front of the other. Each gave a shoulder-shove as he went by, making me stagger. They vanished in the fog ahead. They would be waiting at the next corner, so, making the fog an ally, I doubled back and struck off down a side-street. I could get home by a detour. Presently, I heard them questing noisily, yelling the call with which they always assailed me: “Does your mother take in washing?” It went to a sort of tune, with a heavy stress on the first syllable of the last word, the “ing” trailing away and rising. I used to hear that call in my sleep. It haunted me everywhere.
Now they were on my trail. They had tumbled to my poor ruse. I turned swiftly to the right, down a dark lane between two sets of back doors. It was a fool’s move, for it was a dead-end. I could hear them whooping through the fog and prayed that they would rush by. But they didn’t. They felt their way cautiously down the entry and found me trembling, with my hands still clutching the big knot in the sheet, the bundle still on my back. I don’t know why they persecuted me. Simply because they were young and foolish and I was helpless, I suppose. They tore open the bundle, scattered its contents in the muddy lane, leapt among them like mad things, chanting their song, and ended by pushing me down into the sorry mess, snatching my cap from my head, and making off with wild hoots of laughter.
How I hated washing! It seemed to dominate life in our house in Shelley Street. It announced itself in the front window: Washing and Mangling done here. It made itself felt in the narrow passage-way which always smelt of steam and soap-suds. It overpowered the kitchen where, everlastingly, washed clothes hung from lines suspended under the ceiling, from clothes-horses grouped round the fire; and where the smell of ironing seemed the accompaniment of all life. But most of all it inhabited the scullery where the copper was, with a fire beneath, and where my mother wearily boiled, and rubbed on the rubbing-board, and rinsed and mangled.
What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down, with just the scullery thrown in! I don’t remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out.
I was the youngest of the lot, the kid, the nuisance, too young to be of much use to the others either for work or play. They were glad to be rid of me; and, looking back to the conditions we lived in, I don’t blame them for that. All the same, I felt it at the time. I could imagine the sigh of relief when the front door banged behind me. It made me turn in on myself.
One way of getting rid of me was often used in the summer. We had a small trade in herb beer, as a notice announced in our window alongside the one which advertised our activities in washing and mangling. I was often sent off to gather the herbs. A slab of bread and butter and a bottle of water were placed in a large basket, and, thus provisioned, I was expected to relieve the household of my presence for the best part of a day. I did so gladly.
It pleased me very much to turn out of the black fortress of Hulme and strike southwards along the Palatine Road that was not then the roaring tramway track it has since become. With the sky blue overhead and the road white with dust underfoot, I tramped along enthralled by the evidences that passed me of a world of unimaginable wealth and splendour. From their great houses that lined the road all the way between Fallowfield, Withington and Didsbury the kings of cotton came on their way to Manchester. Victorias and phaetons and barouches, coachmen with gloved hands and cockaded hats, footmen, gentlemen on horseback: all passed by along the road that was gay with hawthorn and cherry trees, laburnum, lilac and chestnut. Now and then, leaning back upon her cushions with a parasol above her head, some lady would be bound for the shops of St. Ann Square or Market Street, a lady so daunting with her great hat and flounced cape and lowered insolent eyes that it was impossible to conceive the circumstances in which her life was passed.
And there were the houses themselves to gaze upon and wonder at: big, square, stucco-fronted houses for the most part, each one standing splendidly in its own grounds, with conservatories looking like ornamental copies of the Crystal Palace, and stables, coach-houses and outbuildings in which you might have lost, and been no wiser, the four rooms of our house in Shelley Street.
Shelley Street! What mania was upon the builder when he so named that joyless, dingy alignment of brick traps! Byron Street and Keats Street and Southey Street and many another street blessed with the name if not the nature of poetry ran off the same black trunk of a high-road from which we branched. And to me, then, the names were nothing but names, and the name of Shelley Street evoked, as I passed the mansions of the rich, only a pang of bitterness and envy.
For, young as I was, I hated all the circumstances of my life. I hated the carrying of bundles of washing. I hated the turning of the mangle, and most of all I hated the close compression of a life that threw us all upon one another by day and night, and made us bite and snarl, and gave no one the chance to be alone. So that when I saw the fine rich houses on the Palatine Road, I burned to be as rich as the people who lived in them. I dreamed of a great room in which I might be alone, of a house full of servants whose chief job would be to prevent anyone from coming near me, of a park which would interpose itself between me and the touch and commerce of men.
I loved to go out on that job of gathering nettles and dandelions and the few other herbs from which our beer was brewed, because solitude could be had thereby. It did not take long in those days, even from the heart of Manchester, to reach flowery fields and hedgerows full of meadowsweet and ragged robin, nor did it take long to eat my bread and butter, swig my bottle of water, and fill the basket with herbs. Then there was nothing to do but wander here and there, lie for hours under a hedge, watch the swifts hurtling across the blue sky, and dream my unfailing dream of being rich.
It is incredible to me now that, then, I had never read a book. I couldn’t read; I couldn’t write. If I had been able to read, I should doubtless have been acquainted with many stories of boys like myself who had become cotton magnates or this or that, and whose first thought had been to make their old parents comfortable and relieve the want of their brothers and sisters. I was unaware that the morality of fiction demanded that of me; my dreams were crude and stark and centred upon myself. There was no one else in the picture. I didn’t want anyone else in the picture. I wanted just me, comfortable, isolated from the demands and stresses of life.
It was because that foul range of dungeons miscalled a street was also called Shelley Street that a turn came to my career. In the pleasant rural part to which I had gone one day in my quest for herbs there was—and is today—an old church of red sandstone squatting in the midst of its graveyard on an escarpment from which you look down to the low water-meadows where the Mersey loops and twists. It is still a pleasant spot, and then seemed paradisal, for the city had not yet marched to within miles of it; and nothing met the eye save a comely house here and there, and tall trees, and the meadows where cattle were wading in the deep pastures.
I lay in the churchyard with my filled basket at my side, with a grey tombstone, fallen askew, to support my back, and with nothing to do but let the tranquillity of the day drift by till it was time to set out for home. The old man who came into my life at that moment was named Oliver—the Reverend Eustace Oliver.
Reverend enough he looked to me, pacing slowly through the grass among the tombstones, his long white hair reaching almost to his shoulders, his clothes black and austere, the index finger of one hand tucked within the pages of a book.
I scrambled to my feet with a feeling that this man, clearly a parson, owned this churchyard and that I had better get out of it. I was picking up my basket when Mr. Oliver put a hand upon my shoulder with a touch extraordinarily gentle and forced me back to where I had been sitting. Then he, too, with a smile at me, sat down upon the grass. “Don’t run away,” he said. “This is God’s acre.”
When I got to know Mr. Oliver better, I found him full of these phrases—what, I suppose, we should call today cant phrases—but he meant them all, and he was a good man.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about that afternoon, except that he asked me my name and I said William Essex; and he asked me “How old are you, William?” and I said twelve; and he asked me where I lived and I said Shelley Street. Then he smiled again, and showed me the book he was carrying, and said: “I often wander down Shelley Street myself.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and said: “I’ve never seen you there, sir,” and he replied patiently: “No, no. I mean I read Shelley. This book, you see—these are Shelley’s poems.”
He held the book out to me and I said: “I can’t read, sir,” and to that he answered: “Well, let me read to you.”
It was a strange afternoon, and it ended magnificently in Mr. Oliver taking me to the kitchen door of the vicarage. He said to the cook, with his unfailing childlike smile: “Mary, feed my lambs,” and Mary fed me on tea and bread and butter, raspberry jam and cake.
It was with no thought of Mr. Oliver’s exalted discourse, but rather in the hope that the raspberry jam would happen again, that I contrived to be in the churchyard often during that summer. Sometimes Mr. Oliver appeared; sometimes he didn’t; and even when he did, the lamb was not always fed. But the feeding was frequent enough to justify a going on with the experiment; and the upshot of it all was that out of cupidity on my part and a tolerant friendliness on his there arose an easy relationship between us which ended by his offering me employment. The wages were something ridiculous, but I was to have my keep, and Mr. Oliver said he would teach me to read and write.
He kept his word, and for three years I lived happily. There was plenty to do. I was the servant of every servant about the place. I helped the cook in the kitchen, lighting fires, cleaning cutlery with bath brick ground to powder, scrubbing tables, keeping the joints turning before the fire. I helped the old man who looked after Mr. Oliver’s horse and garden, cleaning out the stable, carting manure to the garden dump, weeding the borders and raking the gravel of the paths, and occasionally even grooming the horse that was as old and grey and quiet-tempered as Mr. Oliver himself. I helped the sexton to keep the church clean; and in the first fury of my desire to be a good and useful servant, I even began to tidy up the tombstones, scraping with a nail the moss from the inscriptions. But Mr. Oliver wouldn’t have that. He stopped me gently with a murmured remark about the unimaginable touch of time.
My lessons with Mr. Oliver were at no stated hour. At any time of the day he was liable to drop on me, snatch me away from my work, and take me to the copybooks in his study. I liked the winter evenings best, with the oil lamps lit in the brown room full of faded books and with a fire rustling and twinkling in the grate. The room looked upon open fields, and not a sound disturbed us save the occasional crying of an owl. Mr. Oliver sat in his easy chair by the fire, wearing comfortable slippers and smoking a long clay pipe. I sat up to the table which was covered with a red cloth fringed with little balls, and wrote or read aloud from my book.
I owe this to Mr. Oliver: that as soon as I could read at all—and I took to it with really remarkable speed—he kept me reading solid things. We began with the Old Testament; we read some Burton and Browne and some of the speeches of Burke, strange enough stuff for a boy, but it gave me an early sense of rhythm, of richness, a palate which was never easy afterwards with the second-rate.
I didn’t realise it at the time; but what had happened to me was a chance in a million: I had acquired, and kept for three years, a private tutor of exceptional intelligence and skill at his job. Some whim had set him off; he was a bachelor and, I suppose, lonely; but having taken on the task, he did it thoroughly. He wrote a beautiful hand, and so do I to this day. He taught me something of geography. Never a place-name was mentioned but we must find it on the globe. He gave me a smattering of history and talked to me about the men and the happenings that filled the newspapers.
What is more, I had plenty to eat, and I had space and quiet. I slept in a loft over the stable, and, believe me, there was no hardship in that. It was a roomy loft with a window that looked over the fields. In the summer-time the river mists would be up, and I would see the cattle moving through them so deeply immersed that nothing was visible but their ridged spines like the keels of upturned boats floating on an opalescent lake. In the winter it was cosy in that loft, with three blankets on my bed of hay, and, above all, I was alone there. All the fabled joys of family life were taken from me, and I was happier, healthier and wiser in every way.
I worked hard. I was cleaning out the stable before seven in the morning, and what with my jobs and my lessons I had hardly a moment to spare till ten at night. My wages were ten pounds a year. Shameless exploitation of boy by wicked parson! Nonsense! What I owe to Eustace Oliver I can never repay.
At the end of the first year, he offered me my ten pounds. To a boy of thirteen, who had never handled more than a shilling at a time, it seemed an immense sum—a sum so immense that I could not accept the responsibility of touching it. There was nothing I could do with it. I could, of course, have given it to my parents, but the thought never crossed my mind. I saw them but rarely—more and more rarely as the year went on—and found myself wanting to see them less and less.
I needed no clothes. Though it was not in his bargain, Mr. Oliver provided them. I had plenty of food and a roof over my head; and, though I had by this time reached the point where I should have bought books if there were none to hand, I didn’t need books either. There was all Mr. Oliver’s library to explore.
So Mr. Oliver said he would bank the money for me and give me five per cent interest. And that was another piece of education for me. I learned that money I had no immediate use for had the delightful property of adding to itself with no effort whatever on my part.
“You see,” Mr. Oliver explained, “if you had a hundred pounds out at five per cent, then at the end of the year you’d have your hundred with another five added. But as you’ve only got ten, that is one tenth of a hundred, you’ll only get one tenth of the five pounds, that is ten shillings. But that is something, William, for the ten pounds plus the ten shillings will all be added to your next ten pounds, and then you’ll have twenty pounds ten shillings all earning five per cent.”
That was my first lesson both in mathematics and finance, and it seemed very good and wonderful to me.
I never had lessons with Mr. Oliver on a Saturday evening, for Saturday evenings were reserved for Mr. George Summerway. George Summerway lived in one of those fine stucco-fronted houses that were scattered about the church and vicarage. Like Mr. Oliver, he was a bachelor, but that was all, so far as I could see, that there was in common between them. Summerway was a huge, broad-shouldered man with a head overflowing with crisp black hair. He had a loud Lancashire voice that bellowed forth frighteningly from his florid face. He was always dressed with an overpowering elegance. He ran to tight trousers and sprigged waistcoats and a white beaver hat. You could see him driving up to town most days, managing the reins with an air, while a depressed-looking coachman sat beside him in the dogcart.
Throughout the time I lived with Mr. Oliver, he and George Summerway dined at one another’s houses on alternate Saturday nights. It was on a Saturday night in the winter when I had served Mr. Oliver for two and a half years that he sent for me to the dining-room. The table was littered with the relics of the feast. George Summerway sat with one elbow leaning upon it, his chair skewed away, his legs sprawled out towards the fire. He was twirling a glass of port in one hand.
“Well, this is t’lad, is it?” he bellowed, as I stood timidly within the doorway. His face was flushed, and his curling black hair hung over his forehead. “Looks a skinny ’un to me.”
“He’s strong enough,” said Mr. Oliver quietly. “I’ve been talking to Mr. Summerway about your future, William.”
“Wants thee to go into t’cotton trade. Does that appeal to thee, lad?”
I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I stammered and blushed. The thing had been sprung on me too suddenly.
“We’ve taken him at a disadvantage, George,” said Mr. Oliver kindly. “I’ll talk to him about the idea.”
“Ay, an’ get him to learn to talk, too,” Summerway shouted, swigging down his port. “Tha’s got to shout in t’cotton trade. No place for dumb ninnies. And learn summat about figures, lad. Learn summat about figures, an’ then us’ll see.”
That was all at the moment, but throughout the rest of that winter and during the succeeding spring Mr. Oliver conscientiously bent his mind to teaching me “summat about figures.” I could feel that it was not a matter greatly to his taste. Often his hand would stray to some favourite volume, as though for once he would break the routine and diverge into paths more congenial. But he would put the book down with a sigh and take up a foolscap sheet ruled with cash lines.
We were occupied with this business of figures up to nine o’clock one May evening. It had been a beautiful day, and suddenly Mr. Oliver thrust away the work as though he were impatient with it. “That’ll do for tonight, William,” he said, and walked to the window to look out over the water-meadows towards the last flush of sunset that lingered in the sky. Then, as was his custom, he expressed his deepest emotion in a catchword. “The golden evening brightens in the west,” he murmured. “Good-night, William.”
“Good-night, sir,” I said.
The next morning Mr. Oliver was found dead in his bed.
Mr. Oliver died on a Wednesday. Mr. Summerway told me to report to his office in Mosley Street on the following Monday. I disliked the idea of going home, but there was nothing else to do, so I went. Things were greatly changed since I had last been there six months before. There was no congestion now. My father had disappeared—had quite simply walked out of the house one morning and never come back. He is not exiled in order that he may dramatically reappear in these pages. He never did reappear. He was gone, mysteriously and for ever. My eldest brother, who was married, was now living in the house with his wife and my mother. There was no one else. My other brother had joined the army. One of my sisters had gone to “live in” at a large drapery store in the town; another had taken a position as “general.” Concerning the third I could get no information whatever. “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” my mother said darkly; and to this day I have never discovered what happened to my third sister.
My brother was twenty-five years old and worked as a boilermaker. He did not receive me graciously, and I don’t blame him for that. His wife, whom I had never seen before, was a dark surly girl, big with her first child. They owed me nothing, and had no reason to want me about the place. I spent an intensely unhappy week-end, and when I set out on the Monday morning for George Summerway’s office I made up my mind to follow what seemed to be a family habit: to disappear without a word.
I did so. I was fifteen years old, in good trim after three years of fresh air and generous feeding, but thin as a lath, dark as night, as all our people were, and as melancholy as hell at the sudden overturning of my world. I had in my pocket thirty pounds, plus some odd shillings, my faithfully computed five per cents, and in a carpet bag I had a few clothes.
I was disappointed with George Summerway’s offices. I had expected that so splendid a personage would conduct his affairs in splendid circumstances, but, though his own room was airy enough, the rest of the premises was dismal and dingy beyond what I should have thought possible.
“Report to Mr. O’Riorden,” Summerway had said to me, and when I came in that morning out of the clear air of May I found Mr. O’Riorden before me, sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window. Mr. O’Riorden was himself small and dusty. When he stood up, I saw that already I was taller than he. He could not have been more than five feet two. He was as bald as an egg, and from the crown of his shining skull down to his chin his skin was of a dull parchment yellow. His clothes were black and formal, shiny with use. He wore paper protectors over his cuffs, and his silk hat hung from a hook behind the door. He looked at me from over the top of steel-rimmed spectacles, and said: “So you’re Essex? Young and blooming. The good God help ye.” He shook his head as though the sight of me filled him with intolerable sadness.
Having looked his fill, he took a snuff-box from his waistcoat pocket, sniffed vigorously at the brown powder, and said: “Ye’ll work in the outer office. I’ll introduce you to the clerks when they condescend to appear, the good-for-nothing limbs of hell. Ye’ll do just what they tell you. Ah, Mr. Sloper, ye’ve decided to give us the benefit of yer presence?”
I find it difficult at this distance of time to recall the individual characteristics of Mr. Sloper, Mr. Sykes and Mr. Sayers, the three clerks, and that is probably because they had no individual characteristics. They called themselves the Three S’s, and Mr. O’Riorden called them the Three Asses. My recollection is of three witless, cheerful blades who told the bawdiest stories of their nightly doings and whose clear eyes and guileless faces belied the saga of prodigal dissipation with which they regaled me and Mr. O’Riorden.
O’Riorden lived a harassed life, a buffer state between the Three Asses and Mr. Summerway. He called himself the confidential secretary and seemed, in practice, to be an overworked correspondence clerk, taking down innumerable letters in some shorthand system of his own and transcribing them laboriously in longhand into a carbon-copy book. Neither the typewriter nor the telephone was yet usual in such an office as that of Mr. Summerway, and for illumination in the often murky late afternoons we had crude gas jets singing dolefully in little wire cages.
I spent a futile and unhappy morning. It was soon apparent that George Summerway, who had the reputation of having never done a generous thing in his life, had done one for me out of regard for his old friend Mr. Oliver. There was no place for me, there was no need for me, in the office. I was to receive fifteen shillings a week, and I saw no means of earning it. But I provided great fun for the Three S’s who were delighted to have someone to order about and who kept me busy washing their inkwells, dusting their desks and running their errands. When lunch-time drew near, Sayers’s enterprise rose. He handed me a bottle and charged me to go to the dairy and buy half a pint of pigeon’s milk, but when this time-heavy jest failed to get home, they left me alone, with nothing to do but mope idly about the shabby room.
At one o’clock O’Riorden came from his office into the clerks’ room, the Three S’s shut their heavy ledgers with triumphant slams, and four chairs were ritually arranged round the fireplace, though there was no fire in it. Sykes produced four cups from a cupboard, Sayers handed me twopence and a great jug and instructed me to fetch tea from a neighbouring restaurant, which was one small room, a couple of steps below street level, festering with steam and sweat and the smell of cheap food.
When I returned to the office, Mr. O’Riorden and the Three S’s had produced packets of sandwiches and had already begun their lunch; and Sloper was asking: “Well, gentlemen, what is the subject before the meeting today?”
“That Woman,” said Sayers, “is the End All and Be All of Existence; and when our fellow wage-slave William Essex has charged our beakers, I will begin the proceedings by asking you to drink to this toast:
Here’s to the girl with the bluest eyes
The darkest hair and the whitest—”
“William,” said Mr O’Riorden, looking at me uneasily over his spectacles, “haven’t you brought any lunch?”
“No, Mr. O’Riorden,” I said.
“Then you’d better come with me.”
Mr. O’Riorden put on his silk hat, took me by the arm and led me from the room amid the ironical cheers of the Three S’s. “Bravo, O’Riorden!” Sayers shouted, banging a cup upon a chair. “Bravo, the saviour of William’s youth and purity.”
We went to the stinking little restaurant from which I had brought the tea. Mr. O’Riorden’s was not the only silk hat there, for silk hats at that time had nothing to do with income. Mr. O’Riorden opened his packet of sandwiches upon the table that was covered with flaking American cloth, ordered tea for both of us and some sandwiches for me.
“Ye’ll take no notice of them three daft skites,” he said. “They’re all wind and blather and devil a bit of harm to ’em at all.”
I thanked him for bringing me out, and finding him in a friendly mood I suddenly blurted out the truth about my loneliness, of the life I had led for the last three years, and about my resolve not to go home again.
“’Tis a hell of a thing,” he said, looking at me compassionately and helping himself to snuff, “when ye’re not aisy with yer own flesh and blood. ’Tis the worst sort of trouble there is, and only a fool tries to cure it. Mr. Summerway told me most there is to know about ye, but he didn’t say ye’d not be having a roof over yer head.”
“I could sleep in the office,” I said, “till I find some rooms.”
“Ach, to hell with that. What would ye say now to coming home with me? There’s only me an’ the missus and Dermot. There was Fergus, too. But Fergus is away out to America to join my brother who’s doing a sight better than I am. So you can have Fergus’s bed. You’ll have to share a room with Dermot. He’s seventeen.”
I thanked Mr. O’Riorden fervently for thus removing a torment that had been in the back of my mind all day, but he silenced me with a wave of the hand, and the watery little eyes in his yellow face took on a pensive inward look. “It’s queer the way things turn out,” he said. “There was me and there was Conal—that’s me brother in America—without a tail to the shirt of us. And off he goes to America to become a policeman an’ off I go to England to become a rich man. For it was I that had all the learning there was between us, and he nothing but a pair of feet the size you could make tombstones of ’em. And now it’s he that’s rolling in money with a chain of stores the length of me arm, and me that’s takin’ the office boy home to pay a few shillings towards the rent. Ach, well; let’s be gettin’ back to see what them three young hell-rakers are after doing.”
I lived with the O’Riordens for five years, and very happy years they were. To look at, Ancoats was not much better than Hulme, but it was better for me in every way. From the moment I stepped over the O’Riordens’ threshold that first evening I was at home with them. I began on a satisfactory financial basis, which gave me status and did not make me feel like an interloper. I was to pay twelve-and-six a week for my share of a room and my food, and Mrs. O’Riorden was the sort of housekeeper who could do that and make a small profit. She was a Lancashire woman who had worked in a mill, but had no need to do so any more. She had a Lancashire woman’s pride in her house, and 26, Gibraltar Street shone, from the whitened front doorstep to the brass knobs on the bed in the room I was to share with Dermot.
It was this shining quality of the house that impressed me at once. My own house had been dim and dingy; Mr. Oliver’s house had been dim with a sort of faded grandeur, but Mrs. O’Riorden’s house was a riot of gleaming surfaces. Mirrors and crockery, steel fender and fire-irons, picture-frames, chests-of-drawers, linoleum, all filled the house with twinkles; and it was a treat to see her tackle the deal kitchen table with silver-sand and elbow grease, as though she were determined sooner or later to coax a smile even to its dull and unresponsive surface.
I have the clearest recollection of the great kindliness with which I was received, of the absence of embarrassing questions, of the simple frank acceptance of the fact that here was a boy whom father had brought home because he wanted somewhere to live, and somewhere to live he should have. I was taken upstairs to the room that contained two beds: one that had been Fergus’s and now was to be mine, and one that was Dermot’s; and then I went to the scullery where already Mr. O’Riorden, who had taken off his coat, waistcoat and collar, was making great play with soap behind his ears. I took my turn, and then returned to the kitchen, which was the living-room, and there found that Mr. O’Riorden had put on his waistcoat, but not his collar, a pair of carpet slippers, an old jacket and a smoking-cap with a rakish tassel. He looked a new, a more comfortable, an altogether different Mr. O’Riorden. It was evident that home was the place where Mr. O’Riorden was happiest, and that he knew it.
The fire was burning brightly; Mrs. O’Riorden had lit a lamp and set it on the table where already she had laid an extra place for me. Mr. O’Riorden stood before the fire on the thick rag mat, comfortably warming his behind and keeping his back to the portrait of Queen Victoria, in a shining frame, wearing a crown and a blue sash, and the Order of the Garter, and a fat sulky frown. Mrs. O’Riorden, whose bosom was as comfortable as the Queen’s, but who looked an altogether more cheerful and companionable person, was fussing here and there between the fire and the table.
We were waiting for Dermot, and soon he came in, a thin, rather pale-faced red-head, quite unlike either of his parents. His eyes were pale, and he had long gawky wrists covered with fine gold hair. He had fly-away eyebrows, rushing up like little opened wings. When he saw me, a stranger, they flew up higher, as though they would rush away altogether with surprise and agitation. He accepted me with the friendliness his mother had shown. There was a great courtesy about Dermot, cloaked in a great shyness. I never forgot him as he stood there that night, anxious to fly from the unexpected, constrained by his good manners to stand his ground and give himself to me in friendliness. He was working for a cabinetmaker, and as we shook hands I saw that there was a fine powdering of sawdust in his eyebrows and in the hair on his wrists.
We ate Lancashire hot-pot, and then we ate apple dumplings and then we all had a hot strong cup of tea. It was a satisfactory evening meal as Lancashire understood it; and for my part, though I’ve eaten the faldelals of the most famous restaurants since then, I don’t know that I prefer them to that.
Washing-up was a communal activity. I carried the things to the scullery; Mr. O’Riorden washed them, Mrs. O’Riorden wiped them, and Dermot put them away. The white cloth was whipped from the kitchen table, a red one was put in its place, and Mr. O’Riorden took a book from the book-case. He sat on one side of the fire and Mrs. O’Riorden, with a basket of darning, on the other. “Now, mother,” said Mr. O’Riorden, “we’ve just got up to the death of Little Nell.” He began to read.
I had read no novels with Mr. Oliver. I had never read a novel or heard one read; and I didn’t hear much of The Old Curiosity Shop that night. Dermot made a sign with his head. I followed him into the scullery. He shut the kitchen door. “Let’s leave ’em,” he said. “They’re happy. Come and have a look at this.”
We stumbled down the dark path which cut the tiny garden into halves. At the end, Dermot said: “Stand still while I get a light.” A latch clicked, a match was struck, and presently I walked into the small shed which leaned against the end wall of the garden. “This is my place,” Dermot said. “What d’you think of it?”
I looked about me by the light of the lantern swinging from the roof. A work-bench almost filled the shed. There was just room to move round it. Shavings were everywhere, shavings and sawdust, and the air was full of the lovely smell of wood. There were hammers, planes, chisels, gouges, saws, and there was a glue-pot and a small oil-stove for heating it. “There’s no screw-driver,” I said.
“I never use screws,” Dermot answered with a smile. “You wouldn’t insult a lovely job like that with a screw.”
He ran his hand lovingly over a piece of work that stood on the bench. It was a cupboard flanked by bookshelves, and the door of the cupboard was not yet on. It lay alongside the other work, with a rough scrawl of pencil markings upon it. Here and there gouges had bitten into the marks. A design was beginning to take shape. “For Father to keep his old Dickens in,” Dermot explained. “It won’t be finished before Christmas at the rate I’m getting on. No time. I ought to give all the time I’ve got to this sort of thing.”
He moved about in the scanty room of the workshop with the light from the lantern falling on his high cheekbones and his freakish, fly-away eyebrows. He rubbed his hand caressingly up and down the planks that leaned against the wall. “Oak. Ash. Walnut. Teak.” His voice sounded as Mr. Oliver’s had done when he was reading a poem. Suddenly he asked: “What do you think of William Morris?”
I had never heard of William Morris, and said so. Then Dermot’s pale eyes lighted up with a missionary fervour, and I began to think that, if I lived long with him, William Morris was someone of whom I should hear a great deal. But it was characteristic of Dermot that, having flared like a rocket and shot his fire, he never mentioned William Morris again except in the most casual fashion. But that night, kicking to and fro among the shavings, feeling the edges of his tools, rubbing his hand over his planks, and taking a gouge or two at the design on his cupboard door, he preached the gospel of William Morris with a hot and eloquent tongue. Beauty in every home, each stick of furniture lovely and appropriate, every workman a craftsman glorying in his craft, loving his material, such was the burden of the song into which Dermot broke lyrically that night. He never sang it again, but I never forgot it, never had any doubt of the joy he found in that little shed, or of the passion he could impart to a thing that lay close to him.
It was a fruitful passion, too. Let me go ahead here a little and say that during the five years I lived with the O’Riordens I saw the furnishing of the house change under Dermot’s hands. He finished the book-case for his father; and after that, one by one, appeared an oak refectory table for the kitchen, with bulbous legs, sumptuously carved, chairs to match it, covered with leather which he stinted himself to buy, and in Mr. and Mrs. O’Riorden’s bedroom occurred a bed of such gothic splendour that Mrs. O’Riorden declared she was afraid to sleep in it: it looked too much, she said, like the bed in which Henry the Eighth had murdered all his wives. These were but the main waves of a tide of craftsmanship which Dermot let loose upon 26, Gibraltar Street.
I had evidence that first night of another passion in Dermot’s life. Mr. and Mrs. O’’’’