Part 28

From Dorchester we bicycled to Tiverton in Devonshire, where Nancy’s old nurse kept a fancy-goods shop. Nancy helped her dress the shop-window and advised her about framing the prints that she was selling. She also gave the shop a good turn-out, dusted the stock, and took her turn behind the counter. As a result of Nancy’s work the week’s receipts went up several shillings and continued at the improved figure for a week or two after we were gone. This gave Nancy the idea of starting a shop herself on Boar’s Hill. It was a large residential district with no shop nearer than three miles away. She said that we should buy a second-hand army-hut, stock it with confectionery, groceries, tobacco, hardware, medicines, and all the other things that one finds in a village shop, run it tidily and economically and make our fortune. I undertook to help her while the vacation lasted and became quite excited about the idea myself. She decided to take a neighbour, the Hon. Mrs. Michael Howard, into partnership. Neither Nancy nor Mrs. Howard had any experience of shop-management or commercial book-keeping. But Mrs. Howard undertook to keep the books while Nancy did most of the other work. Nancy was anxious to start the shop six weeks after the original decision, but army huts were not obtainable at any reasonable price (the timber-merchants were in a ring); so it was decided to employ a local carpenter to build a shop to Nancy’s design. A neighbour rented us a corner of his field close to the Masefields’ house. The work was finished in time and the stock bought. The _Daily Mirror_ advertised the opening on its front page with the heading ‘Shop-Keeping on Parnassus,’ and crowds came up from Oxford to look at us. We soon realized that it had either to be a big general shop which made Boar’s Hill more or less independent of Oxford (and of the unsatisfactory system of vans calling at the door and bringing stuff of inferior quality with ‘take it or leave it’) or it had to be a small sweet and tobacco shop making no challenge to the Oxford tradesmen. We decided on the challenge. The building had to be enlarged and two or three hundred pounds’ worth of stock purchased. Mrs. Howard was not able to give much of her time to the work, having children to look after and no nurse; most of it fell on Nancy and myself. I used to serve in the shop several hours of the day while she went round to the big houses for the daily orders. The term had now begun and I was supposed to be attending lectures in Oxford. Another caricature scene: myself, wearing a green-baize apron this time, with flushed face and disordered hair, selling a packet of Bird’s Eye tobacco to the Poet Laureate with one hand and with the other weighing out half a pound of brown sugar for Sir Arthur Evans’ gardener’s wife.

The gross weekly takings were now £60 a week and Nancy, though she had given up her drawing, still had the house and children to consider. We had no car, and constant emergency bicycle-rides had to be made to Oxford to get new stock from the wholesalers; we made a point of always being able to supply whatever was asked for. We engaged a shop-boy to call for orders, but the work was still too heavy. Mrs. Howard went out of partnership and Nancy and I found great difficulty in understanding her accounts. I was fairly good at conventional book-keeping; the keeping of company accounts had been part of my lecture-syllabus when I was instructing cadets. But that did not help me with these, which were on a novel system.

The shop business finally ousted everything, not only Nancy’s painting, but my writing, my university work, and Nancy’s proper supervision of the house and children. We had the custom of every resident of Boar’s Hill but two or three. One of those whom we courted unsuccessfully was Mrs. Masefield. The proximity of the shop to her house did not please her. And her housekeeper, she said, preferred to deal with a provision merchant in Oxford and she could not override this arrangement. However, to show that there was no ill-feeling, she used to come once a week to the shop and buy a tin of Vim and a packet of Lux, for which she paid money down from a cash-box which she carried with her. The moral problems of trade interested me. Nancy and I both found that it was very difficult at this time of fluctuating prices to be really honest; we could not resist the temptation of undercharging the poor villagers of Wootton, who were frequent customers, and recovering our money from the richer residents. Playing at Robin Hood came easily to me. Nobody ever caught us out; it was as easy as shelling peas, the shop-boy said, who also took his turn behind the counter. We found that most people bought tea by price and not by quality. If we happened to be out of the tea selling at ninepence a quarter which Mrs. So-and-so always bought, refusing the eightpenny tea, and Mrs. So-and-so asked for it in a hurry, the only thing to do was to make up a pound of the sevenpenny, which was the same colour as the ninepenny, and charge it at ninepence; the difference would not be noticed. We were sorry for the commercial travellers who came sweating up the hill with their heavy bags of samples, usually on foot, and had to be sent away without any orders. They would pitch a hard-luck tale and often we would relent and get in more stock than we needed. In gratitude they would tell us some of the tricks of the trade, advising us, for instance, never to cut cheese or bacon exactly to weight, but to make it an ounce or two more and overcharge for this extra piece. ‘There’s few can do the sum before you take the stuff off the scales and there’s fewer still who will take the trouble to weigh up again when they get back home.’

The shop lasted six months. Nancy suddenly dismissed the nurse. Nancy had always practised the most up-to-date methods of training and feeding children, and the nurse, over-devoted to the children, had recently disobeyed her instructions. Nancy put the children before everything. She decided that there was nothing to be done but to take them and the house over herself, and to find a manager for the shop. At this point I caught influenza and took a long time to recover from it.

War horror overcame me again. The political situation in Europe seemed to be going from bad to worse. There was already trouble in Ireland, Russia and the Near East. The papers promised new and deadlier poison gases for the next war. There was a rumour that Lord Berkeley’s house on Boar’s Hill was to become an experimental laboratory for making them. I had bad nights. I thought that perhaps I owed it to Nancy to go to a psychiatrist to be cured; yet I was not sure. Somehow I thought that the power of writing poetry, which was more important to me than anything else I did, would disappear if I allowed myself to get cured; my _Pier-Glass_ haunting would end and I would become merely a dull easy writer. It seemed to me less important to be well than to be a good poet. I also had a strong repugnance against allowing anyone to have the power over me that psychiatrists always seemed to win over their patients. I had always refused to allow myself to be hypnotized by anyone in any way.

I decided to see as few people as possible, stop all outside work, and cure myself. I would read the modern psychological books and apply them to my case. I had already learned the rudiments of morbid psychology from talks with Rivers, and from his colleague, Dr. Henry Head, the neurologist, under whose care Robert Nichols had been. I liked Head’s scientific integrity. Once when he was testing a man whom he suspected of homicidal mania he had made some suggestion to him which came within the danger-area of his insanity; the man picked up a heavy knife from his consulting table and rushed threateningly at Head. Head, not at all quick on his legs and dodging round the table, exclaimed: ‘Typical, typical! Capital, capital!’ and, only as an afterthought: ‘Help! Help!’ He had great knowledge of the geography of the brain and the peculiar delusions and maladjustments that followed lesions in the different parts. He told me, at different times, exactly what was wrong with Mr. Jingle in _Pickwick Papers_, why some otherwise literate people found it impossible to spell, and why some others saw ghosts standing by their bedside. He said about the bedside ghosts: ‘They always come to the same side of the bed, and if you turn the bed round you turn the ghost round with it. They come to the contrary side of the lesion.’

A manager was found for the shop. But as soon as it was known that Nancy and I were no longer behind the counter the weekly receipts immediately began to fall; they were soon down to £20, and still falling steadily. The manager’s salary was more than our profits. Prices were now falling, too, at the rate of about five per cent, every week, so that the stock on our shelves had depreciated greatly in value. And we had let one or two of the Wootton villagers run up bad debts. When we came to reckon things up we realized that it was wisest to cut the losses and sell out. We hoped to recoup our original expenditure and even to be in pocket on the whole transaction by selling the shop and the goodwill to a big firm of Oxford grocers that wished to buy it as a branch establishment. Unfortunately, the site was not ours and the landlord was prevailed upon by an interested neighbour not to let any ordinary business firm take over the shop from us and spoil the local amenities. No other site was available, so there was nothing to do but sell off what stock remained at bankrupt prices to the wholesalers and find a buyer for the building. Unfortunately again, the building was not made in bolted sections, and could not be sold to be put up again elsewhere; its only value was as timber, and in these six months the corner in timber had also been broken and the prices fallen to very little. We recovered twenty pounds of the two hundred that had been spent on it. Nancy and I were so disgusted that we decided to leave Boar’s Hill. We were about five hundred pounds in debt to the wholesalers and others. A lawyer took the whole matter in hand, disposed of our assets for us, and the debt was finally reduced to about three hundred pounds. Nancy’s father sent her a hundred-pound note (in a match-box) as his contribution, and the remainder was unexpectedly contributed by Lawrence. He gave me four chapters of _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_, his history of the Arab revolt, to sell for serial publication in the United States. It was a point of honour with him not to make any money out of the revolt even in the most indirect way; but if it could help a poet in difficulties, there seemed no harm in that.

We gave the Masefields notice that we were leaving the cottage at the end of the June quarter 1921. We had no idea where we were going or what we were going to do. We decided that we must get another cottage somewhere and live very quietly, looking after the children ourselves, and that we must try to make what money we needed by writing and drawing. Nancy, who had taken charge of everything when I was ill, now gave me the task of finding a cottage. It had to be found in about three weeks’ time. I said: ‘But you know that there are no cottages anywhere to be had.’ She said: ‘I know, but we are going to get one.’ I said ironically: ‘Describe it in detail; since there are no cottages we might as well have a no-cottage that we really like.’ She said: ‘Well, it must have six rooms, water in the house, a beamed attic, a walled-in garden, and it must be near the river. It must be in a village with shops and yet a little removed from the village. The village must be five or six miles from Oxford in the opposite direction from Boar’s Hill. The church must have a tower and not a spire. And we can only afford ten shillings a week unfurnished.’ There were other details that I took down about soil, sanitation, windows, stairs and kitchen sinks, and then I went off on my bicycle. I had first laid a ruler across the Oxford ordnance-map and found four or five villages that corresponded in general direction and distance and were on the river. By inquiry I found that two had shops; that, of these two, one had a towered church and the other a spired church. I therefore went to a firm of house-agents in Oxford and said: ‘Have you any cottages to let unfurnished?’ The house-agent laughed politely. So I said: ‘What I want is a cottage at Islip with a walled garden, six rooms, water in the house, just outside the village, with a beamed attic, and rent ten shillings a week.’ The house-agent said: ‘Oh, you mean the World’s End Cottage? But that is for sale, not for renting. It has failed to find a purchaser for two years, and I think that the owner will let it go now at five hundred pounds, which is only half what he originally asked.’ So I went back and next day Nancy came with me; she looked round and said: ‘Yes, this is the cottage all right, but I shall have to cut down those cypress trees and change those window-panes. We’ll move in on quarter-day.’ I said: ‘But the money! We haven’t the money.’ Nancy answered: ‘If we could find the exact house, surely to goodness we can find a mere lump sum of money.’ She was right, for my mother was good enough to buy the cottage and rent it to us at the rate of ten shillings a week.

Islip was a name of good omen to me: it was associated with Abbot Islip, a poor boy of the village who had become Abbot of Westminster and befriended John Skelton when he took sanctuary in the Abbey from the anger of Wolsey. I had come more and more to associate myself with Skelton, discovering a curious affinity. Whenever I wanted a motto for a new book I always found exactly the right one somewhere or other in Skelton’s poems. We moved into the Islip cottage and a new chapter started. I did not sit for my finals.

XXIX

We were at Islip from 1921 until 1925. My mother in renting us the house had put a clause in the agreement that it was to be used only as a residence and not for the carrying on of any trade or business. She wanted to guard against any further commercial enterprise on our part; she need not have worried. Islip was an agricultural village, and far enough from Oxford not to be contaminated with the roguery for which the outskirts of a university town are usually well known. The village policeman led an easy life. During the whole time we were living there we never had a thing stolen or ever had a complaint to make against a native Islip cottager. Once by mistake I left my bicycle at the station for two days, and, when I recovered it, not only were both lamps, the pump and the repair outfit still in place, but an anonymous friend had even cleaned it.

Every Saturday in the winter months, as long as I was at Islip, I played football for the village team. There had been no football in Islip for some eighty years; the ex-soldiers had reintroduced it. The village nonogenarian complained that the game was not what it had been when he was a boy; he called it unmanly. He pointed across the fields to two aged willow trees: ‘They used to be our home goals,’ he said. ‘T’other pair was half a mile upstream. Constable stopped our play in the end. Three men were killed in one game; one was kicked to death, t’other two drowned each other in a scrimmage. Her was a grand game.’ Islip football, though not unmanly, was ladylike by comparison with the game as I had played it at Charterhouse. When playing centre-forward I was often booed now for charging the goalkeeper while he was fumbling with the shot he had saved. The cheers were reserved for my inside-left, who spent most of his time stylishly dribbling the ball in circles round and round the field until he was robbed; he seldom went anywhere near the goal-mouth. The football club was democratic. The cricket club was not. I played cricket the first season but left the club because the selection of the team was not always a selection of the best eleven men; regular players would be dropped to make room for visitors to the village who were friends of a club official, one of the gentry.

At first we had so little money that we did all the work in the house ourselves, including the washing. I did the cooking, Nancy did the mending and making the children’s clothes; we shared the rest of the work. Later money improved: we found it more economical to send the washing out and get a neighbour in to do some of the heavier cleaning and scrubbing. In our last year at Islip we even had a decrepit car which Nancy drove. My part was to wind it up; the energy that I put into winding was almost equivalent to pushing it for a mile or two. The friends who gave it to us told us that its name was ‘Dr. Marie,’ and when we asked ‘Why?’ we were told ‘Because it’s all right in theory.’ One day when Nancy was driving down Foxcombe Hill, the steepest hill near Oxford, there was a slight jar. Nancy thought it advisable to stop; when we got out we found that there were only three wheels on the car. The other, with part of the axle, was retrieved nearly a mile back.

These four years I spent chiefly on housework and being nurse to the children. Catherine was born in 1922 and Sam in 1924. By the end of 1925 we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of children’s napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life except for the money difficulties, I liked my life with the children. But the strain told on Nancy. She was constantly ill, and often I had to take charge of everything. She tried occasionally to draw; but by the time she had got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would always disturb her. She said at last that she would not start again until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school. I kept on writing because the responsibility for making money rested chiefly on me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing when I have had something to write. We kept the cottage cleaned and polished in a routine that left us little time for anything else. We had accumulated a number of brass ornaments and utensils and allowed them to become a tyranny, and our children wore five times as many clean dresses as our neighbours’ children did.

I found that I had the faculty of working through constant interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’ screams—hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with—and learned to disregard all but the more important ones. But most of the books that I wrote in these years betray the conditions under which I worked; they are scrappy, not properly considered and obviously written out of reach of a proper reference-library. Only poetry did not suffer. When I was working at a poem nothing else mattered; I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had time to sit down to write it out. At one period I only allowed myself half an hour’s writing a day, but once I did write I always had too much to put down; I never sat chewing my pen. My poetry-writing has always been a painful process of continual corrections and corrections on top of corrections and persistent dissatisfaction. I have never written a poem in less than three drafts; the greatest number I recall is thirty-five (_The Troll’s Nosegay_). The average at this time was eight; it is now six or seven.

The children were all healthy and gave us little trouble. Nancy had strong views about giving them no meat or tea, putting them to bed early, making them rest in the afternoon and giving them as much fruit as they wanted. We did our best to keep them from the mistakes of our own childhood. But it was impossible for them when they went to the village school to avoid formal religion, class snobbery, political prejudice, and mystifying fairy stories about the facts of sex. I never felt any possessive feeling about them as Nancy did. To me they were close friends with the claims of friendship and liable to the accidents of friendship. We both made a point of punishing them in a disciplinary way as little as possible. If we lost our temper with them it was a different matter. Islip was as good a place as any for the happy childhood that we wanted to give them. The river was close and we had the loan of a canoe. There were fields to play about in, and animals, and plenty of children of their own age. They liked school.

After so much shifting about during the war I disliked leaving home, except to visit some well-ordered house where I could expect reasonable comfort. But Nancy was always proposing sudden ‘bursts for freedom,’ and I used to come with her and usually enjoy them. In 1922 we used a derelict baker’s van for a caravan ride down to the south-coast. We had three children with us, Catherine as a four-months-old baby. It rained every single day for the month we were away—and the problem of washing and drying the baby’s napkins whenever we camped for the night—and the problem of finding a farmer who would not mistake us for gypsies and would be willing to let us pull into his field—and then the shaft that twice dropped off when we were on hills—and twice the back of the cart flew open and a child fell out on the road—and the difficulty of getting oats for the horse (which had been five years on grass as being too old for work) on country roads organized for motor traffic—and cooking to be done in the open with usually a high wind and always rain and the primus stove sputtering and flaring up. It was near Lewes that we drew up on a strip of public land alongside the horse and van of a Mr. Hicks, a travelling showman from Brighton. He told us many tricks of the road and also the story of his life: ‘Yes, I saw the Reverend Powers, Cantab, of Rodmell last week, and he, knowing my history, said: “Well, Mr. Hicks, I suppose that in addressing you I should be right in putting the letters b.a. after your name?” I said: “I have the right to it certainly, but when a man’s down, you know how it is, he does not like attaching a handle to his name.” For you must know, I was once a master at Ardingly College.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Hicks, and where were you b.a.?’

‘Didn’t I just tell you, at Ardingly? I won a scholarship at the beginning and they gave me the choice of going to Oxford or Winchester or Cambridge or Eton. And I chose Winchester. But I was only there a twelvemonth. No, I couldn’t stand it any longer owing to the disgraceful corruption of the junior clergy and the undergraduates—you understand, of course. I rub up a bit of the classic now and then, but I like to forget those times. The other day, though, me and a young Jew-boy who had cleaned up seventy-five pounds at the race meeting with photographing and one thing and another, had a fine lark. I got out two old mortarboards and a couple of gowns from the box in the van where I keep them, and you should have seen us swaggering down Brighton Pier, my boy.’ A few days later we stopped at a large mansion in Hampshire, rented by Sir Lionel Philips, the South African financier, whom Nancy knew. I found myself in an argument with him about socialist economics, and he told me a story which I liked even better than Mr. Hicks’. ‘I visited Kimberley recently and realized what a deep hole I had made. Where, as a young man, I tore the first turf off with my bare hands, they were now mining down half a mile.’

In the end we got back safely.