Frank Baker Read online

  There were short days in winter when the City seemed to glitter with half-revealed secrets. Days when it rained steadily; when lights were lit early in shops and offices; when the shining streets were domed by the humps of glossy umbrellas. On such days a common goodwill seemed to fall naturally from harassed people, hurrying here and there to catch bus, train, or tram. In face of discomfort, a vision of home, with firelight, tabby-cats, and rich cups of mellow tea, seemed to buoy up men and women. Some days a yellow fog shrouded the streets in gloom, so that every vehicle travelled at a snail’s pace with its lights full on. Then the City was unreal and ghostly. Suddenly in the muddy light you would collide with a newsboy standing at the corner of a street. Down in the smoky underground cafés at four in the afternoon, you would find young men playing dice and chess silently. One forgot the clamour for business in the fog; figures glided past like barges up the river at night.

  There was one day in the month which stands out in my memory: a magic day known as pay-day, when all of us received little en­velopes containing the notes which were our wages. In that hour one realized why people worked, and how foolish it was to imagine that anyone had chosen this sort of life because he liked it. From highest to lowest, all seemed the same in that moment.

  I remember the excitement on Christmas Eve in the City. Christmas, as you know, was a religious feast which celebrated the birth of Jesus. On the vigil of Christmas the offices closed early, there was only a pretence of work throughout the day. Girls would bustle in and out with parcels of presents they had bought; people would come round with raffle-lists. Later, as soon as the taverns were opened, you would find them full of men laughing and joking with the barmaids, drinking one another’s health, wishing all a Merry Christmas. Then, in the long sawdust-sprinkled avenues of Leadenhall Market, merchants sold the last of their stock at low prices, anxious to get it off their hands. There you would find husbands in search of cheap turkeys to take home to their wives for the Christmas feast. Travelling home in the train there always seemed to be less room than usual; everybody carried parcels, everybody laughed; many were drunk, nobody cared.

  Our people were discovered at their best and simplest, whenever any special occasion called them to unanimity. One of the last of such occasions I can recall was that of the death and funeral pro­cession of our King, called George. In bitter winter weather a million people waited in the streets of London in order to see the bleak gun-carriage upon which rested a box containing the body of a pious and simple gentleman whom everybody had loved. Behind the box walked a slight boyish figure—the son of the dead man—the King of England. A week before, men and women had been stirred by a sentence which, cast in the nobility of our beautiful language, re­called everybody to the fact that his own death could not be far off. “The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.” Hearing these words, the people forgot material disputes and pondered upon the great mystery of life and its shortness upon this earth. In a moving solemnity they assembled around a man who, in his dying, emphasized the littleness of their own lives.

  I remember . . . yes, I remember much, much that was pleasant. Many cafés where I talked and ate with my friends; many churches where in summer it was cool and quiet; many alleys where in winter I could search for books. And away from the City I have a picture of myself standing outside the door of Three-hundred-and-ninety-six, listening to my mother playing and singing to herself. She would rarely sing if she knew she had an audience. She had a deep voice—more powerful than one might have expected from her small body. Through the window I caught the glow of the firelight; in the street, men on bicycles with long poles were lighting the gas lamps. An autumn evening with rich sunlight falling down the sky and firing the windows of the Alexandra Palace. Then home was precious.

  Another aspect of that northern suburb is a summer scene; a morning when I rise early, and ride my bicycle to an artificial pool somewhere near the Palace, where it is possible to swim. Here I often went. At that early hour men were different. It was so strange to reflect that those white, naked bodies would in an hour or so be padded with thick clothing, packed in a train and carried to the City. Here, early in the morning, with the fresh sun over them, they were alive, naked, and free, swimming, diving, and lying in the sun as though they had no care in the world. It was a place with a character all of its own, that swimming-pool; and it is bound up in my memory with a morning, the last I ever spent there, which I must presently des­cribe to you in greater detail. Let me not break these retrospective pictures now. Let me cease. I am conscious that however much I try I shall but thinly convey the happiness of those days. It is easy to condemn; harder to praise. When I close my eyes I can hear and almost long for the roar of an underground train; the babble of humanity crowding in the refreshment-room of a theatre; the rustling of old books in some dark shop; the patter of rain upon a thousand umbrellas. I can smell the peculiar hot fragrance of coffee and buns in a tea-shop; the rotten fruit and fish around the London monument; the acid of new print on a newspaper; the scent and sweat of humanity clustered together in a lift. Trains, telephones, cinemas, umbrellas, musty bookshops, tobacco pipes; badly cooked food, heavy clothes, lamps yellow as melons in foggy streets; shrieking of newsboys, clash of iron lift gates, stamping of feet along an under­ground passage; pelicans, solemnly critical in the park; soldiers with gleaming breast-plates; wrinkled old women selling violets under a statue of the god of love; summer mornings in a pool near a network of railway lines; autumn evenings with my mother sing­ing; the phantoms of figures from a hundred books, mounting up my bedroom wall; friends, lovers——

  All this seems incomparable to the rise of that field, the hedge of meadowsweet and vetch below us, the flight of the lark, or the yellow corn stacked there in sheaves.

  Yet suddenly nothing of what I see before me seems real. For a moment I wanted the old life back, whether lies or truth; hypocrisy or candour; cowardice or bravery.

  Whatever it contained it gave me much.

  *

  The events of the last few days had drawn the life out of me so that lately I had been unable to rise early and go to swim in the pool. I would wake early enough. Then turning over again I would mumble petulantly, “What’s the use? What’s it all for?” I did not know what anything was for. When I woke every morning I felt that I could not endure London and Leadenhall any longer. How long would I have endured it, I wonder, had not the birds brought an end to it all?

  One morning, however, only a day or so after my mother and I had been disturbed by the two birds in the garden, I awoke with more consciousness than usual. I suddenly saw that if I succumbed to this spiritlessness, I should rapidly sink into a slough from which there would be no escape. Acting on this thought, I jumped out of bed and quickly put on old trousers and a shirt. I felt stirred by something inside myself which I could not define.

  I went out, got my bicycle, and started to ride. It was not very far, perhaps three miles. A thin bell struck seven from the tower-clock in a shopping centre called Crouch End.

  I rode along a street where there were dingy shops, not yet open for the day’s business. Newspaper boys ran from door to door, thrusting their journals impatiently under knockers and into door-slots. There were men with milk-carts leaving bottles of milk by each door.

  I passed a police station, a fire station, and a public library. The library was the institution where I had first discovered the existence of fine literature. To that singularly barren-looking building I probably owed a great deal more than I ever acknowledged.

  I came down a hill to an older part of the suburb. Back from the road was a solitary old church tower. Every Sunday, bells clashed from it to summon people to the new church which stood close by. Gravestones tumbled in the weedy churchyard. Elder trees, may bushes, and brambles were tangled round stone epitaphs that declined like sink­ing ships deep into the ground.

  There was a feeling of stagnation about
the place. The road was lined by houses all of the same bleak piety; the blinds were drawn, the gates closed. It still bore the title Church Lane, a title reminiscent of a time when there had been trees and fields here, and a wooden bridge over a little stream by the church. All changed, yet resenting the change. There was something melancholy about it in that clear morning light. I felt as though the sun had revealed some ancient grudge which for ever lingered about the place. The houses were so silent it was hard to believe that in an hour or so the doors of most of them would open to release upon the target of London the rapid shot of driven clerks.

  Inscribed upon little white discs on some of the gates were the words “No hawkers; no canvassers; no circulars.” For the first time in my life I noticed them consciously. “Leave me alone,” they seemed to cry. “Leave me in peace. Remind me not of the world’s misfortune. Leave me to my memories of a time when life seemed sweet, when I was young and full of courage.”

  In a few moments I had left Church Lane and reached a wider road where tram-lines marked a route towards London. The scene grew dingier, the scattered shops cheaper. Nothing seemed to be sold here but cast-off clothes, penny magazines, bottles of bright liquid called mineral water, and rickety furniture. I turned off into a street of houses yellower and leaner than those in Church Lane. It seemed as though the very houses them­selves were starved and cracking with lack of sustenance. Every window was draped with threadbare yellow curtains; it was a colour identical with that of a London fog. High above ran the railway lines; somewhere, smudging this meagre scene with smoke, were the two enormous stacks of chimneys.

  I came presently to another main road with more tram-lines. On one side was a chain of dirty red-brick buildings. This was a sweet factory. A sick, burnt smell rose up from it; a smell like sugar and sulphur frizzling to­gether in a coke fire. It was a singular place, sourly gay in some queer manner. Hundreds of girls were employed here, all in the making of an edible substance which nobody in the world required, but which most—because of the power of advertisement—consumed. The smoke that greasily stained the blue sky had this acrid, sweet smell. If you were pos­sessed of a grim imagination you might surmise that here, day by day, people were immolated before some greedy God and burnt; that the smoke rose from the fuel of their sweet flesh.

  I passed the place, my vision quickened; my eyes noticing a hun­dred things I had never before remarked. It was as though the whole grimy suburb had been concentrated for me under a great glass dome, and that through this cover the eager morning sun shot his rays into every detail.

  I rode up a hill towards a railway station. I was getting near to the eastern gate of the lofty grounds of the Alexandra Palace. There were stringy meadows of withered yellow grass on one side of me, surrounded by low palings and marked by long uncomfortable seats. On the other side were more houses, slightly cleaner than those I had just left. I dismounted at the railway station in order to wheel my machine along a passage above the railway line; it was a short cut which soon brought me to the tarred door of a narrow cinder track which led down to the swimming-pool. The track was protected by a black fence with jagged pieces of tin stuck along the top to prevent people from climbing over to the racecourse on one side, the railway em­bankments and reservoirs on the other.

  On my left were little thin patches of sun-baked earth, called allotments, where men reared flowers and vegetables. There were papery sweet peas climbing weakly up string supports; tall yellow daisies; and a few pink-white gladioli with dried leaves falling back from them, the colour and texture of an onion’s outer skin. Nothing looked as though it had any more strength to live. On my right, farther away under some trees, I noticed a hayrick which seemed curiously lonely standing there on the fringe of the racecourse. A few yards in front of me, sunk in a hollow, was the wooden fence surrounding the swimming-pool.

  . . . I suddenly inclined my head. I had heard something. A chattering, a harsh croaking, a sound which seemed to scrape along the quiet morning air like a blunt knife drawn over a slate.

  A man passed me, also on a bicycle, a towel wound about his neck.

  “You’ll never swim this morning,” he called.

  “Are they changing the water?” I asked him.

  “Oh no,” he chuckled. But his amusement was forced. “The place has been turned into a first-class aviary overnight.”

  I heard the chattering sounds again, nearer now. It was like the thin spasmodic laughter of very old people. But no, it was a harsher sound than that; full of a secret glee which I did not like.

  “You mean the birds are there?” I asked the man.

  Yes, he said, the birds were there. They were drinking the water.

  I laughed; so did he. It seemed funny.

  I forgot my disappointment at not being able to swim, and rode quickly to the door, which swung open with its habitual creaking as I pushed it.

  A small knot of men stood talking by the little pay-office to the attendant, a stout broad man whose humour made him very popular. I believe he was an old sailor.

  He turned to me as I pushed the door open.

  “Like a load of dove-dung for the garden?” he shouted with a laugh. “You can come and scrape up a cart-load if you like when these little beggars have done messing around.”

  “How long have they been here?” I asked.

  “All night, for what I know,” replied the attendant. “They was here when I come this morning, and here they’re going to stay, ask me. They’re proper soaks. Lord knows what’ll happen when they find their way into a brewery.”

  I went nearer to the edge of the bath. Lined along one side were little cubicles, each with a cracked mirror advertising some disinfectant. Here, the modest swimmer could disrobe. Few people, however, used them. On the other side were sun-scarred benches and pegs where most people undressed. At the deep end was a long spring diving-board covered by coarse matting. There were steps down to the water at various stages along the sides of the bath.

  But I did not see any water that morning. From end to end of the bath, the surface of the water was thickly obscured by the birds. They barely moved except to dip their heads and drink. A few chattered and croaked. About half-way along a number of them appeared to be quarrelling over one stray bird who hovered above, attempting to penetrate into the solid thicket of wet feathers below him, and find a place in the water. Some of them seemed to want to make room for this outcast; some seemed to resent him. Suddenly he swooped down angrily, pouncing on the softly swaying shapes and forcing a way through with his beak. There was a frenzied screaming and a fluttering of wet feathers.

  “That’s a proper lady,” said somebody.

  “You’d better put up a notice, Joe,” remarked another, “saying as how this is bird’s day and no men won’t be admitted.”

  Some one called me. “Hey, sonny, don’t you fall in! No one’ll ever be able to drag you out of that mess.”

  “Can’t we make them go?” I asked stupidly. “Throw something into the middle of them. . . .”

  There was a life-belt hanging on the fence.

  “What about this?” I suggested.

  “Oh no, you don’t!” A small pale fellow came up and pulled the belt from my hand. “Suppose you make those birds wild? Have you ever thought what they could do?”

  I had often thought what they could do. Yet I wanted to tempt them.

  One or two birds rose from the water and flew on to the diving-board where already a long row was assembled. The sudden move­ment scared me. The little pale man had turned to the door; the others, whistling casually, were drifting slowly in the same direction. Only Joe remained and seemed unmoved.

  “You won’t disturb that old crowd with a life-belt,” he declared, “It’d take a gun to get through that lot, then you’d have the whole bloody bath blown to bits. Throw your belt, sonny; let’s see what they do. It’s my mind they won’t stir, no
t a bloody inch.”

  “I think you’re right, Joe,” I said. “Not really much use in throw­ing it, is there?”

  More birds had assembled in the sky. I saw indeed that there were a great many flying about which I had not before noticed. Those above cried as though to attract the attention of those below; but they would not move. The birds in the air seemed to want to entice the others away so that they could enter the water themselves. But the birds already in the water dipped their heads and drank almost without ceasing, bringing their heads up again and shaking them with prim regularity. They were big birds, nearly as large as rooks, gleaming green and blue, their feathers glittering with drops of water. The same pretty expression was in their sharp faces; the same bright little eyes. But something more; something mean and cunning.

  I drew away from the edge as one or two fluttered out on to the concrete path a yard or so from my foot. I suddenly realized how I dreaded that one of them might touch me. There was a sour smell in the air.

  I turned to the door.

  “Well, so long, Joe,” I said casually. And I told him he ought to start a trade in bird-baths. It was the type of feeble joke for ever upon our lips in those uneasy days.

  I mounted my machine and rode away quickly, looking back once or twice. A man passed me on his way to swim.

  “You’ll never swim this morning,” I called out, glad to find some­body to whom to break my news. And I told him about the birds.

  Then I raced on, past the withered meadows; past the scorched factory; the dingy shops and the railway arch; the old church tower, the gravestones, and the truculent houses; the library, the fire station, and the police station. I raced on, never seeing anything now. For I was possessed of that vitality which drives all carriers of critical news quicker to their destination.

  *