longer schoolboys but semi-grown men. I now walked to school from choice, finding it too much of a bore to queue up for a bus at Ther Boiler in what was always the rush hour when I set out.
Although the penalty for not wearing a hat, whether a bowler, a school cap or a straw hat, was quite severe (a beating usually administered by a prefect), I preferred at this age to be beaten rather than draw attention to myself by wearing any of these sorts of headgear, just as by this time I was prepared to risk punishment for talking with girls I knew from St Paul’s Girls’ School on their way home by bus, some of whom also removed their hats but for a different reason – because they were good-looking and did not want to look like schoolgirls.
The only good thing about this crazy outfit was the umbrella. Less lethal than a cricket bat (with which if you hit someone really hard you might easily kill him), the umbrella, used as one would use a rifle with a bayonet or as an outsize truncheon, rather like those carried by the mounted police, was an ideal weapon.
Uncivilized as my behaviour may seem today, in a more squeamish but much more dangerous age, I can only plead that I had no choice. The penalty of defeat or, even worse, capture, would have been by this time much more serious than anything I experienced at Colet Court.
As a result of this misuse, my umbrella and those of my schoolfellows who found themselves in similar situations soon became useless for the purpose for which they were intended, either failing to open when it rained and they were needed, or else opening and falling to pieces.
These journeys from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the streets of Hammersmith altogether continued for eight years of my life (not including the period when, as a small child, I attended the Froebel kindergarten in Baron’s Court). In me they engendered some of the feelings of excitement, danger and despair that some nineteenth-century travellers experienced in darkest, cannibal Africa and in the twentieth century in the Central Highlands of New Guinea. And even today and now with even more reason, I sometimes experience a chilly sensation when walking alone down a narrow south London street.
CHAPTER EIGHT Lands and Peoples
Up to now the reader may feel, and with some justification, that my travels have been of a somewhat parochial nature. By the time I was eight years old, apart from a visit to the Channel Islands in 1923, I had never been out of England, not even to visit Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Yet, in spite of this, I already knew a good deal about these places and their inhabitants, as well as the wider world beyond the British Isles.
This was because, some time in the 1920s, my parents took out on my behalf a subscription to The Children’s Colour Book of Lands and Peoples, a glossy magazine edited by Arthur Mee, at that time a well-known writer who was also responsible for the to me rather boring Children’s Newspaper, which I had given up buying in favour of more trashy, exciting comics. Lands and Peoples, according to the advertisements which heralded its publication, was to come out at regular intervals and when complete the publishers would bind it up for you to form six massive volumes.
What distinguished Lands and Peoples from other similar publishing ventures was that it was illustrated with colour photographs. ‘Marvellous as photography is, in one sense it has failed,’ the editor wrote. ‘The colour photograph is a dream … Here it is that the bold idea of Lands and Peoples has succeeded beyond all expectations. What Science has failed to do, Art has done … Some seven hundred photographs from all over the world have been coloured by artists from original sources, so that they become actual photographs with colour true to life, a remarkable anticipation of the final triumph of the camera that will show the world as it really is, in all its glow of red and green and gold.’ It was no hollow claim. The colours were in fact more true to life than those produced from much of the colour film in use today.
What excitement I felt when Lands and Peoples came thudding through the letter-box at Three Ther Mansions, in its pristine magazine form. To me, turning its pages in SW13 was rather like being taken to the top of a mountain from which the world could be seen spread out below, a much more interesting world than the one my father read bits out about from his Morning Post to my mother while she was still in bed, a captive audience, sipping her early morning tea.
Lands and Peoples was addressed to ‘The Generation whose business it is to save Mankind’ – mine presumably, although I had no suggestions to make about how it should be done. ‘We are marching,’ Mee wrote, an incurable optimist, apparently envisaging a pacific version of the Children’s Crusade, with the children waving white flags instead of brandishing crucifixes, ‘towards a friendlier and better world, a world of love in place of hate, of peace instead of war, and one thing is needful – an understanding of each other … it is the purpose of this book so to familiarize us with the lands and peoples of the world that we can cherish no ill-will for them. We are one great human family, and this is the book of our brothers and sisters.’
I never read the text. All the efforts of what was presumably an army of experts in their various fields, painfully adapting their ways of writing to render them intelligible to infant minds, were totally wasted on me. All I did, and still do, for I still have the six volumes, was to look at the photographs, of which there were thousands in black and white besides the seven hundred or so in colour, and read the captions and the short descriptions below them of a world which, if it ever existed in the form in which it was here portrayed, is now no more. What I saw was a world at peace, one from which violence, even well-intentioned sorts, such as ritual murder and cannibalism, had been banished, or at least as long as the parts kept coming.
In Merrie England, donkeys carried the Royal Mail through the cobbled streets of Clovelly, milkmaids in floppy hats churned butter by hand in the Isle of Wight, swan uppers upped swans on the River Thames, genial bearded fishermen in sou’westers mended nets on the Suffolk coast, town criers rang their bells, and choirboys wearing mortarboards, using long switches, beat the bounds of St Clement Danes.
In the Land of the Cymry, which is how Lands and Peoples described Wales, ancient dames wearing chimney-pot hats stopped outside their whitewashed cottages to pass the time of day with more modern, marcel-waved neighbours, and cloth-capped salmon fishers paddled their coracles on the River Dee.
In Bonnie Scotland, brawny, kilted athletes tossed the caber, border shepherds carried weakling lambs to shelter from the winter snows, women ground corn with stone hand-mills in the Inner Hebrides and, far out in the Atlantic, on St Kilda, the loneliest of the inhabited British Isles, men wearing tam-o’shanters and bushy beards were photographed returning homewards with seabirds taken on its fearsome cliffs.
In the Emerald Isle, bare-footed, flannel-petticoated colleens drew water from brawling streams, or knitted socks in cabins in Connemara, while little boys in the Aran Islands wore skirts to protect them from being kidnapped by the fairies.
Further afield, as I turned the pages, covering them with Bovril (for one of my greatest pleasures was to go to bed early with Lands and Peoples and at the same time eat Bovril sandwiches), I came upon Czechs and Slovaks and Hungarians wearing embroidered petticoats irrespective of sex, and incredible hats – in Rumania there were men who wore garters with little bells on them, who looked like sissies to me. I also saw fellers of proud giants in the Canadian forest; savages of New Guinea – their hair plastered with grease and mud; Jews in Poland – a new state with a glorious past; sun-loving Negroes in South Africa; happy Negro children romping in the ‘Coloured Section’ of New York; Kirghiz tribesmen on the ‘Roof of the World’; Orthodox scholars wearing arm thongs and phylacteries studying the ancient laws of their people; penguin rookeries in the Great White South; geishas negotiating stepping stones in Cherry Blossom Land; hardy Indian women on beds of nails at Benares; laughter-loving
