A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby

Magnet and the Gem, both of which I was allowed and both of which Kathy enjoyed reading to me as much as I enjoyed listening, much more vulgar than the Children’s Newspaper, which because of its virtuous nature I already found boring. It was a useless prohibition anyway, as I could always borrow one of these more vulgar comics – ‘I say, man, if you let me have a go of your comic you can have a go of my liquorice strip’ – from other less watched-over boys at school.

      Bad for the teeth were: lemonade made with lemonade crystals, much more delicious in my opinion than real lemonade; toffee sticky enough to pull out entire rows of stoppings; gobstoppers, huge sweets like musket balls that changed colour and the colour of your tongue progressively as you sucked them; sherbet imbibed through liquorice tubes from cylindrical yellow packets that looked like fireworks (oddly enough I was allowed liquorice); toffee apples that always had a thin layer of dust on them that had blown into the shop from the street outside.

      Embedded in the pavements at some of the street corners there were cast-iron bollards, shaped like muzzle-loading cannon with imitation cannon balls stuck in their imitation muzzles, against which old men could usually be seen leaning, wearing cloth caps, white silk mufflers or red-spotted neckerchiefs and suits of what even to me seemed antique cut.

      In 1927 the poor looked much poorer than they do today, in Hammersmith or in any other part of London. Their everyday clothes in those days, before sponging and pressing and dry-cleaning became commonplace, looked as if they had been slept in. For working men, manual labourers who lived by the sweat of their brows, there was no such thing as winter or summer clothes. A working man wore the same suit all the year round, except on Sundays. In summer, if it was really hot, he might discard his jacket, hardly ever his waistcoat, even though the cloth from which such a suit was made was often thicker and heavier than that used to make a present-day overcoat.

      Because of this the poor often smelt. It was not a term of derision as it usually was at Colet Court. ‘Yah, you smell!’ Although some boys there did smell. It was a fact. One only had to travel, as I sometimes did to my great delight, on one of the tall, two-storeyed tramcars that used to sway down King Street from Hammersmith Broadway with bells clanging, like sailing ships rolling down to Rio, on my way to visit my Auntie May at Stamford Brook, or else travelling down Shepherd’s Bush Road en route with Ellen to visit an uncle of hers who had a boot repairing business in Goldhawk Road, to know this smell for yourself, a bitter-sweet odour that a modern traveller, Laurens Van Der Post, identified some thirty-five years later (in connection with the Russian proletariat, en masse) as the smell of soiled clothing, left and forgotten in a laundry basket. A bath was a tub half-filled with water from the copper in which the weekly wash was done. A wash was a lick and a promise in the kitchen sink.

      I took more notice of the children of the poor than of the grown-ups, because they were nearer my level in the world in terms of feet and inches, and therefore more often confronted me. I remember the boys more than I remember the girls because the boys tended to move about in gangs. I remember them, not all of course, but many, as being pale and thin, some of them almost transparent, so that looking at their faces with the skin drawn tight over them and their cropped, sometimes shaven heads above, I had the impression of being able to see their skulls through the skin.

      But, although some were painfully thin, with bulgy, raw-looking knees protruding below the ungainly-looking shorts they wore, cut down from the discarded trousers of their elder brothers, they were tough, as tough as those of their fathers who had survived the war. Among themselves they fought like ferrets, on the pavements, in the gutters, anywhere, not caring what damage they did to one another or their already tattered clothes, putting in the boot, as it is now called, when they were able, employing methods that at Colet Court were regarded as unfair, except by the gangs of bullies whose techniques surpassed anything the poor could think up at that time in terms of the infliction of physical pain. Their parents fought, too. Their fights were not the lightning affairs their children were adept in, as if they were torpedo-boats racing in to an enemy anchorage and doing the greatest amount of damage in the least possible time and then getting out again. They were lumbering, major actions between what were more like dreadnoughts, that went on until one or other of the participants was rendered hors de combat, or until the police arrived. Such encounters in the streets of Hammersmith were awful to watch, at least to me, because the idea of grown-ups of whatever condition, who were presumed to know better, actually fighting one another, pulling great tufts of one another’s hair out sometimes if they were women, was unthinkable.

      The children of the poor, boys and girls alike, were resourceful. They had to be. Apart from marbles and iron hoops they had scarcely any bought toys; or if they had they must have kept them indoors as I never saw any. They tied lengths of ragged rope to the crossbars of the street lamps and swung on them, or else used them for skipping. In the autumn the boys played conkers, as we did at Colet Court, bashing away at one another’s iron-hard, specially cured horse chestnuts on a string until one or other of them broke. They also played various street and pavement games, such as hopscotch, according to the season of the year, marking out the courts with chalk. If I and my friends used to chalk out the same games on the pavements in Riverview Gardens, residents complained and we got ticked off by the porters, who were numerous. What I envied them were the scooters and little carts, made for them by their fathers or elder brothers, using wood from old packing cases and wheels from discarded roller skates. These scooters made what to me was a wonderfully deafening noise as their owners scooted along the pavements or, more daringly, along the road. I thought them far superior to my own bought scooter from Hamleys which, although possibly a little faster, was depressingly noiseless, being fitted with rubber wheels. In the little carts, which were almost equally noisy, they used to pull their younger brothers and sisters, most of whom should have been in prams if they had had prams, all the way from Hammersmith up Castlenore to Barnes Common and back, a couple of miles each way. How these infants survived such jolting journeys is a mystery.

      They were brave, too. In summer, when it was high tide at Hammersmith, some of the boys who could not have been more than nine or ten, used to dive into the then indescribably filthy water from the parapet of the bridge, a good fifteen feet above it, and then, never having been taught to swim properly, dog-paddle to the embankment. They used to do this until a policeman, or a policewoman wearing a helmet like an upturned basin, a huge blue serge skirt and big black boots, used to appear and chase them into Hammersmith, still naked, clutching their ragged clothes, but never catching them.

      Besides being tough, resourceful and brave they were also, so far as I was concerned, and anyone who travelled the same route to school as I did, extremely nasty. In the summer of 1928, for the first time I was allowed to go to school without Kathy, providing that I travelled by the back street route, avoiding Hammersmith Broadway, in which my parents were always convinced that I would be run over. Sometimes, but not always, I travelled with another boy who lived nearby us, whose parents bound him to the same conditions.

      To us, the perils of this back street route were far more real than any of the risks our parents imagined us running in Hammersmith Broadway, such as being knocked down by a bus or tram. It took us through the heart of territory in which the poor and underprivileged lay in wait while on what appeared to be their more leisurely way to their own schools. Travelling with Kathy, herself a member of the working class, I now realized was like having been provided with some sort of laisser passer. In any event, she stood no nonsense from anyone and on the only occasion she did have trouble, when what seemed to me a very large boy, one as tall as she was, crept up behind her and pulled her long hair, she gave him such a resounding slap in the face that he went off howling. Now, using the same route, we encountered the enemy, an enemy waiting to jeer at us, shove us about, smash our straw hats in or pinch our caps, according to the time of year.

      If there were only a couple, and they were not too large, we used to stand and fight. We were quite good at fighting, in fact, for much of the time we did little else in the breaks at Colet Court, and quite often we succeeded in sending them away blubbing. Surprisingly, for all their ferocity, they seemed less able than we were to put up with physical pain.

      If we did win such a victory, however, our triumph was usually short-lived. No later than the next day we would find ourselves the subject of a major ambush by members of the same tribe. This