The Rebels

II

II

T

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garden and that house of my childhood now seem to me the very symbols of failure and despair, though I do not think they struck me like that at the time when they were my world, not consciously, at the least.

Once, before I was born, when even Tom was still swaying unsteadily on his feet in thick lace-fringed petticoats, my father was a partner with Quaker Griffith in an ironworks that lay somewhere near Bloxwich and had its own reach of the canal for loading. Founded by my grandfather, who had come from Wales to seek his fortune among the Midland men, it had flourished and had even become powerful in a community of hardworking egalitarian iron-fighters, who asked little more of their masters than that they should pay a just wage and should themselves take a turn with their hands in the works, if the occasion asked for it. And this grandfather was a big bull-necked man with a great square jaw, who would have died before he would have admitted that any one of his workmen could beat him at anything . . .

My grandfather had married a fitting woman, a woman who matched him for strongmindedness and singleness of purpose. That grandmother Dunn was respected and feared by most folk in her immediate neighbourhood, from Parson to pitman. Her ready advice was asked on all topics, from the best manner of decorating the church for Harvest Festival to the easiest way of bringing on labour to a young woman facing her first confinement. “Ask Mistress Fisher,” the words went round—whether the question was one of making a brewing of parsnip wine or of redeeming the bed-linen from a pawnshop when the ticket had been lost . . . “Ask Mistress Fisher.” That is her epitaph. I shall not have such a one to take with me to the underworld.

And though she was as ready to lend a guinea to a hard-pressed furnaceman as she was to give him the sharp edge of her tongue if she thought he deserved it, she was both loved and respected. In those days, Darlaston was a rough place, as I have said, perhaps only a whit better than Wednesbury, and that because it was smaller and perhaps because there were more of the old families still living there and exerting some slight influence of decency and of good manners. Yet it was not every woman’s wish to walk the narrow ill-lighted streets of Darlaston after dusk. But when my grandmother walked abroad, the shouting and cursing in alley-ways fell silent and dark-faced men turning out from the riotous taverns stopped and touched their caps . . .

It was a matter of family commonplace that my grandmother Dunn had once killed a man, and that while she was still only a young woman, not yet thirty I believe. It happened one afternoon in summer when she was ironing a shirt for my grandfather, who was to attend an ironmaster’s Dinner that night at The George in Walsall. A local girl ran into the kitchen breathless and sobbing.

“Oh Mistress Fisher, Mistress Fisher!” she said. “That dirty man has been meddling with us again!”

My grandmother put down her flat-iron and said, “Where is he, Sarah-Ann?”

“Down by the old cinder wall where he always waits, Mistress,” stammered the girl. “He always waits for us there and jumps out on us and lifts up his apron to show us.”

“Yes,” said my grandmother, a righteous woman, “And nobody does anything about it to prevent you from being molested. But what our men wunna do, that I will! Now go you home and see after your father’s socks and that man will not trouble you any longer.”

Then my grandmother took off her pinafore and put on her best bonnet and shawl. And she went quickly down to the old cinder wall where the half-mad old man still held a young girl by the shoulders, snuffling at her.

And without saying a word she took him by that part of his body which he was so often anxious to display and so dragged him back through the streets without mercy.

“Oh Mistress, oh Mistress!” sobbed the wretch. “Leave me go and I’ll never do it again. I beg you, Mistress! I’ll never do it again!”

But my grandmother never spoke until he fell down groaning. And then she turned and said, “May that teach you your manners, Samuel Smalley.” And so she went back to her ironing-board.

And that evening the constable from the Bull Stake came down to the house and very respectfully told her that the man had died in Walsall Infirmary, but that she would hear no more about it as he was a dangerous character and a woman must defend herself, come what may.

My grandmother snorted, “Hear no more about it! Indeed! And I should think not, either!”

Then she gave the policeman a glass of her parsnip wine and he was himself glad to get away from the house so whole, after the look in her eye, he said.

That was my grandmother, the stock from which I came. How strange it is that our family seemed to owe so little to that strong pair. I lacked her strength of mind just as my brother Elijah lacked grandfather’s forthright industry. I think that we perhaps belonged to an earlier age of the family; something weaker, more imaginative, perhaps more poetic even.

And that was the stock from which my own father inherited his foundry, being their only son and having been apprenticed to the iron-working from the age of fifteen.

I do not remember my father ever working at the foundry, or now exactly where it was, even, for things have changed so much in the years. By the time I was walking and able to understand things a little, he had already sold out his share in the works to a large Company from Wolverhampton, old John Griffith staying on as managing director. I think father was paid very adequately for his share, though I know that Griffith stood out against selling for long enough and my father’s adviser, Lawyer Foster, counselled him not to accept the offer at the time. But whether he showed lack of business sense or not, father thought he was doing the right thing for he had always had a great longing to travel, to sail the seas, and even to his death still wore that black yachting-cap that never came within many miles of salt-water.

Yet father knew what he wanted. He was already about forty-five and seemed to feel that his years of vigour were numbered and that unless he saw the world now, he never would do. Besides, he had clinched a bargain with the incoming Company that my elder brother Tom should be taken into the firm and one day be given a position of high responsibility. So that father never felt that he had lost the ironworks completely. With Tom as managing director it would be like having it in the family again. And in the meantime his sold-up shares gave him enough to retire on and to live a comfortable if not luxurious life.

So father retired to a pair of cottages at the edge of the town, where some of us were born and where we spent our earliest years. And then, before he was fifty, not having been able to go out on his dream-travels because of domestic affairs, he became very restless and began to have strong doubts about the wisdom of having sold the foundry. There was almost an acre of ground behind the cottages, which were situated right on the roadside, and one bright morning father woke up with the notion of erecting a small factory in which he could instal buckle-making machines, for the small steel industries were at that time making great headway in the district.

At first my mother consented to the plan and soon drayloads of bricks began to arrive, worn and discoloured things which had once formed a works chimney that had recently been demolished and which had come on to the market at a cheap rate. Then we children began to watch the new factory rising behind our cottages and played among the cement-pits and scaffolding when the workmen had gone away at night.

But when the great square building had risen to a height of six feet or so, my mother took the plan into her own hands and called a halt. The family were growing up, she declared, and the two cottages were already too cramped. We would abandon the factory scheme, since father had enough money to see us all without want until we could earn for ourselves, and instead of a new factory we would build a house more worthy of a retired ironmaster.

At first my father was angry, then wavering, and at last compliant—for he carried within himself the very fault of irresolution for which he so often castigated us. So in the end he came to be resigned and our new house began to rise, a triumph to my mother, gaunt, tall, unlovely, but in its way proud and even defiant, for from a distance it reared its high gables above the other houses within sight, looking in its night-time silhouette as though it tried to belittle everything within reach. A strange hybrid it was, tall yet carrying below it two rotund bow-windows that made it look rather like a pot-bellied alderman when seen from the garden. It turned out to be an L-shaped house, for when the main body of it was completed, my mother felt the need of more room still, and so grafted on to the parent-body of the house was a long conservatory, and after that a kitchen, and after that a coal-house, and even then a privy.

So the buildings grew and multiplied to satisfy mother’s recurrent whims; a midden, a great barn, two lots of pigsties . . . And my father watched it all sadly, seeing his dream of power fading, until the plants bloomed in the conservatory and the face of the house was shrouded with ivy and the thick-tiled roof of the privy became hidden with wintergreen.

Then at last he finally surrendered and sat in the sun, under his lilac trees before the bow-window, and watched the waves of the Atlantic receding into the limbo of all his lost dreams.

And that was where we spent most of our lives, in that tall gaunt house, one room of which, the room to which was attached the conservatory, hardly ever saw the light of day, but had always to be lit by the sputtering gaslamps, for which father had installed an engine, between the lavatory and the midden-wall.

That dark room is the one I remember best for it lay perpetually in the power of the vegetable-green light that was reflected from the lush foliage on the other side of its one window. It was the room in which was kept our most ornate furniture, the mahogany and dark-green figured plush; and all the other treasures of my parents—the black marble mantel clock shaped like a Grecian temple, the bull’s head cheese-dish, the gilt-locked family bible on the cross-legged bamboo table, the Wedgwood china services, the heavy cut-glass bowls, the big coloured prints of Inkerman and of Balaclava.

In this room we held our Christmas feasts, our Readings from the Scriptures, our funeral suppers. It was the place of solemnity, the room where no one ever laughed, no, not even Elijah himself.