that now far-off Saturday in December 1919 turned out to be, and what was going on in the world beyond the windows of that first-floor flat in which I was born facing the Metropolitan Waterboard’s reservoirs and filter beds by the Thames on the Surrey side of Hammersmith Bridge.
At 3.45 a.m., the ghastly hour I chose, or rather the doctor chose, for my arrival – I had to be hauled out by the head – conditions must have been pretty beastly in Barnes. It was a dark and stormy night, with a fresh wind from the west whose gusts would have been strong enough to blow clouds of spray from the big reservoir (which was opposite our flat by the bridge and which has now been filled in to make playing fields for St Paul’s School) over the pavement and right across the main road (which was called Castelnau but which all the inhabitants knew and know to this day as Castlenore) as it always did when the wind was strong from that particular quarter, sometimes, but rarely at 3.45 a.m. wetting unwary pedestrians and people travelling in open motor cars.
And it was certainly dark, although the moon had been up for more than thirteen hours and was only a day off full. It would be nice, more romantic, altogether more appropriate for a potential traveller, to think of myself arriving astride the Centaur, and, Sagittarius being in the ascendant, perhaps carrying the latter’s arrows for him, as we moved across a firmament in which ragged clouds were racing across the path of a huge and brilliant moon; but it was not to be. It was ordained that I should be a child not only of darkness but of utter darkness, of ten-tenths cloud.
It was not much of a night for the distinctly grumpy, and, from what I subsequently gathered from my mother, very pompous Harley Street gynaecologist to be out, summoned from his residence in Hampstead to this distant and unfashionable address at 2 a.m. by my father, using the telephone which he had had installed expressly for this contingency. On the other hand, it could have been colder. At 4 a.m. the thermometer at Kensington Palace, a couple of miles away on the other side of Hammersmith Bridge, registered a temperature well above freezing in the 40s Fahrenheit.
This ‘specialist’ subsequently performed an operation on my mother so incompetently and, so far as there was any possibility of her having any more children, so definitively, that years later the operation became the subject of a highly critical article in one of the medical periodicals in which my mother was referred to as Mrs N and the surgeon as Mr X, by which time he was dead and beyond the processes of the Law. That night he travelled to Barnes in what my father described to me when I was old enough to be curious about the circumstances of my birth as ‘an electric brougham’.
The driver of such a machine sat outside, perched high up on a box, fully exposed to the elements – which would have been necessary if he had been driving a horse – while the passengers were accommodated in its leather upholstered and buttoned interior in considerable comfort. And, in fact, the effect produced by one of these contraptions, which looked as if its horse had bolted without it but was still moving forward by the force of gravity, steered by its gloomy, peak-capped driver with a wheel on a vertical column (gloomy because for most of his life he had probably driven horse-drawn broughams and regarded this development as an affront to nature), was highly comical. And when I eventually travelled in an electric brougham, aged five, on a night of thick pea soup fog and torrential rain in December 1924, from my grandparents’ house in Winchester Street, Pimlico, back to Hammersmith Bridge, with my mother and father and an uncle and aunt, all warm and dry and full of food inside, while the driver was drenched with rain and half asphyxiated by fog on the outside, I laughed till I cried, all the way shrieking, ‘He hasn’t got a lid on!’
It was my mother, who was in a position to feel the full force of the specialist’s grumpiness, who told me about it. However, why he was grumpy when he was being paid so highly for something he had contracted to do, and was treated to whisky on his arrival and champagne on my arrival, as well as chicken sandwiches, is not clear. Presumably the nature of his job must have accustomed him to working at odd hours, like lighthouse keepers and policemen. His grumpiness, however, was as nothing compared with that of another telephone subscriber to whose number my father was connected in error before getting through to the specialist, the work of one of the operators at the Hammersmith Exchange, whose fruity ‘SORRRYY YOU’VE BEEN TRRROUBBLED!’ did nothing to convince the wretched man, dragged from his bed at two in the morning, that anyone was sorry at all.
It would not have been much of a night for the homeless poor, their clothes stuffed with newspaper, who slept rough on the towing path down by the river all through my early childhood, and who would certainly have been there that night. Most of them were regulars. Some were terrifying-looking women; some were ‘tramps’, the first ‘real’ travellers I can remember seeing, pointed out by my nurse. But not many of them would have been tramps because most tramps were too solicitous of their personal comfort to share the appallingly draughty, unspeakably filthy but more or less rain-proof camping place used by these unfortunate outcasts, up against the reeking abutments under Hammersmith Bridge, only about fifty yards from where, a boisterous baby, I was now giving tongue. But on this particular night with a high spring tide some time after midnight (high water at London Bridge was at 12.12 a.m.) their pitch would have been a couple of feet under water for an hour or more, and they would have been sleeping among the bushes down towards Putney, or up against the trunks of the huge black poplar trees that grew along the towing path opposite Chiswick Mall further upstream to which normal spring tides did not reach.
Some of these men and women drank methylated spirits. If they became violent, they were ‘taken into custody’ by the police. This usually meant that a couple of unfortunate constables, sometimes one alone, had to strap the prisoner, male or female, who by this time would probably be striking out, biting and scratching, to a handcart and then wheel it a mile or more up Lonsdale Road from the Boileau Arms, which everyone called, and still calls, ‘Ther Boiler’, to Barnes Police Station with the occupant roaring loudly enough to wake the dead. If more than one person had to be taken into custody, a Black Maria was sent for.
When it dawned, the day was even more rumbustious than the night. And when the sun rose, just before eight o’clock, like the moon, it remained invisible. Thunderstorms visited many parts of the country, accompanied by hail, sleet or snow and west or north-westerly winds which reached gale force in high places. In Lincolnshire, the Belvoir Hunt, having ‘chopped a fox’ in Foston Spinney (seized it before it fairly got away from cover), ‘were hunting another from Allington when scent was totally swept away by a tremendous rainstorm’.
‘Flying Prospects’ on my birthday were not good, according to The Times. It is now difficult to imagine that a pilot, or even a passenger, might actually buy a newspaper in order to find out whether it was safe to ‘go up’, but it must have been so, otherwise there would have been no point in publishing the information at all. ‘Unsuitable for aviation or fit only for short distance flying by the heaviest sort of machine’ was what the communiqué said. ‘Sea Passages’ were equally disagreeable. The English Channel was rough, with winds reaching forty miles an hour, and there was extensive flooding in France.
But if the weather was disturbed that Saturday, it was as nothing compared with the state of great chunks of Europe and northern Asia. In spite of the fact that the advertising department of The Times had chosen this particular Saturday to announce ‘PRESENTS SUGGESTIONS FOR THE GREAT PEACE CHRISTMAS’, on it Latvians were fighting Germans, on whom they had declared war a week previously on 28 November, and so were the Lithuanians. In Russia, on the Don and between Voronezh and Kirsk and in Asia, beyond the Urals, along the line of the Trans-Siberian Railway, where typhus was raging, Bolsheviks and White Russians were engaged in a civil war of the utmost ferocity. Meanwhile, that same Saturday, while their fellow countrymen were destroying one another, with their country in ruins and becoming every day more ruinous, Lenin and Trotsky and the 1109 delegates of the Seventh All-Russian Congress of Soviets passed a resolution to the effect that ‘The Soviet Union Desires to Live in Peace with All Peoples’. On that day, too, Lenin told the Congress that ‘Communistic Principles were being utterly disregarded by the Russian peasantry.’
That
