I
One’s birth, as to period, place, social position, connections and education, should be determined by every man for himself before the event in accordance with the career, or the kind of work, destined for him by the Gods. I am supposing that he has the choice offered him, together with an outline of the future—not a future of fate laid down with Calvinistic rigour, but a future of possibility. And as time, past or future, does not exist in the other world, I am supposing that a man can be born in any age that he pleases. For many reasons I myself, though I speedily forgot the circumstances attendant on the choice, decided—quite rightly, I believe—that the nineteenth century, so far as I could judge—not being able to foretell the twentieth or following centuries—would be the most favourable time for a person like myself. “You,” said my guardian angel, “are to be endowed with certain powers of imagination which you will do well to cultivate; you will have a tolerably good memory, which you will also cultivate, if you are wise; in good hands you might become a scholar, a divine, a preacher, a journalist, a novelist, or a historian. There will be limits, of course, to your powers. I fear that to you will not be granted the supreme gift of the foremost rank. But you will do what you can. How and where and when will you please to be born?”
A difficult choice. If a man is to be a statesman, he should be born in such a station as would enable him to take a place in the front at anytime, with the feeling that command and leadership belong to him; if a soldier, then he should be of a family connected with the Services, and not wholly without property. If a man is to become a clergyman, good breeding, good manners, and a public school education are invaluable. If a lawyer, or a physician, or any other profession, easy manners which come from good breeding are always a help. If on the other hand a man is destined to be a writer of the kind which demands imagination, sympathy, observation, then he should ask to be born neither in the lowest ruck nor in the upper levels. For in the former case the manners and the standards of the people would become part and parcel of himself, so that he would be unable to separate himself from them, or to describe them, or to understand them; while in the latter case he would have no chance of observing or knowing how those people live for whom getting their livelihood is the first and most important consideration. For such a writer the most favourable position to be born in is that of the so-called middle class, where one is not so far above the mass as not to know or to understand something of their thoughts and standards, of their manners, their customs and their convictions: and where one is yet so far removed as not to be led or guided by them, or to be unable to get outside their prejudices. For much the same reason one would not choose to be born in London, which is too vast; in London a child of the middle class grows up in a suburb, where he lives among respectable folk, and gets no knowledge either of higher society or lower. There have been, it is true, many children of London who have achieved greatness. Not to speak of Chaucer and Milton, Ben Jonson and Pope, there have been such writers as Charles Lamb and Hood; while Dickens and Thackeray also were practically Londoners, but in the days before suburban dullness. On the whole, a place outside London would seem preferable; that place not to be a quiet village, but a busy town, with its own distinctive character and its own distinctive people.
These arguments, in my theory of free and antenatal selection, prevailed, and I was allowed a seaport of the first rank as the place of birth; the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the time of birth; and the middle class for the social rank from which to start. In such a rank one begins by looking around and below, but not, as a rule, above.
I have no doubt in my own mind that it was also by choice that I became one of a large household, so that the rough and tumble of boys and girls together might knock out something of selfishness and something of conceit; a family where there was not too much money, and where economy was practised—yet without privation—in everything; and where one understood from the outset that for success, if success was desired—it is not every boy who is ambitious—there would have to be hard work. And I am equally certain of the benevolence of the guardian angel when I consider that, as regards work among books, I was born of an industrious turn of mind. It was, again, a most wholesome discipline to learn from childhood that whatever is wanted must be earned. It has been my lot to live among those who have succeeded by their own abilities and hard work, and I find, as a general rule, that the sons of such men have never learned this wholesome discipline, but have grown up in the belief that fortune’s choicest gifts drop into the laps of those who sit and sleep in the sunshine and wait.
I was born, then, on the evening of Sunday, August the 14th, in the year 1836, now sixty-three years ago, the place being that known as St. George’s Square, Portsea, a broad, open place of irregular shape lying on the east of the Common Hard, and containing a curious, sprawling barn of a church belonging to the time of George the Second. More about this Church presently. The number of the house where I saw the light was, I believe, three. I was the fifth child and the third son of a family of ten, of whom nine grew up, and at this moment, January 1900, seven survive.
Great changes have taken place in my native town since my early recollections. It was, in my boyhood, a strangely picturesque place in its own way. There was no other town in England at all like Portsmouth. It then consisted of three divisions: the old Town of Portsmouth; the eighteenth century Town of Portsea; and the Quarter called Point. The suburbs of Landport and Southsea were already growing—indeed, Dickens was born at Landport in the year 1812—but they were small places. The former contained a dozen streets, chiefly of a humble character, with a crescent of handsome villas standing in their own gardens; the latter contained one line of terraces, with a main street and two or three narrow lanes. The terraces were occupied by retired Service people and lodging house keepers—Southsea, from the beginning, was always a place for Service people.
There are no ancient buildings at all in Portsea, which is an eighteenth century town, or in the suburbs, but there are a few in Portsmouth. The Domus Dei, the mediaeval Hospital, has been converted into the Garrison Chapel; here Charles II married Catherine of Braganza. The old church of St. Thomas, with its ship for a weathercock, I always regarded with veneration, but I believe that only the chancel and the transepts are ancient. There is a square stone tower at the end of the High Street, with a gilt bust of Charles I, who landed here on his return—without the Infanta—from Spain. There were a few wooden houses in Portsmouth, and in my boyhood a large number of low, somewhat picturesque gabled houses belonging to the time when no dwellings were allowed to be higher than the town walls. One of them, unless I mistake, still survives.
The High Street, however, possessed the charm of a certain antiquity. The town hall, the house where the Duke of Buckingham was murdered, the quaint little Unitarian chapel, the “George” and “Fountain” inns, the red brick houses, and an air of quiet and dignity, not disturbed by recent traffic, made the street impressive. But the glory and pride of the town were its walls. There were two lines of fortification, that of Portsmouth and that of Portsea. One the other side of the harbour was a third line, the walls of Gosport. These walls were constructed on the well known system with a scarp, counterscarp, advanced works, a moat, gates and bridges, and bastions commanding the walls in flank and planted with cannon. A broad walk ran along the top of the walls, with a parapet from which the defender would fire over the sloping earthwork breast high. Trees were planted along the broad walks; upon every bastion there was a meadow with a grassy down slope; and at intervals there were stone watch towers. Between the walls of Portsea and those of Portsmouth was a broad sheet of water, called the Mill dam, which rose and fell with every tide—an artificial lake constructed with an eye to the fortifications. It had a causeway running across it and an island in the middle of it. The island contained a bastion and a small house, in which resided a sergeant and his family. This island, to live on which seemed to me the height of happiness, communicated with the causeway by means of an iron bridge. The walls, with the meadows before the bastion, the moat, the counterscarp, the advanced works and the Mill dam occupied a very considerable space. Outside the whole a clear area was kept on which no houses were permitted to be built. The suburbs of Portsmouth, therefore, were unconnected with the town; they lay beyond this clear space. The walls were the playground, the park, the breathing place for the children and the boulevard for the people. Old and young walked on the walls. Nursemaids took the children every fine day to the walls. They were quite safe, for if a child rolled down the sloping face its fall was over grass and into grass, and no harm was done. The little boys brought hoops, and ran them round the walls. They clambered about the bastions, and peered into the mouths of the cannon, and sat upon the gun carriages, and crept out fearfully through the embrasures, and, looking over into the moat below, played at seeing the enemy beyond; or they ran down the grassy slopes to the meadows, which in spring were spread with a golden carpet of buttercups. These excursions were illegal. There was a special police for the walls; it consisted of three or four men, reported to be of short temper, who carried canes, with which they “warmed” boys caught in the meadows or on the slopes. These guardians were called “Johnnies,” and I always regarded them as unfortunate men of a misanthropic turn whose occupation, to catch and “warm” boys, was also their pleasure. But as regards ourselves, I think that measures of conciliation had been adopted, because we seem to have run about everywhere, on the slopes or over the meadows, or even in the embrasures, unmolested.
One of the bastions was our especial delight. It was the last on the side of the harbour; it was more secluded than the others, being farther from the town, and few children found their way to it. They called it the Queen’s Bastion. I have described the place in one of my novels—that called By Celia’s Arbour. It is not doing an injustice to the memory of my collaborateur, the late James Rice, who was not a Portsmouth man and had never seen the place, to claim that part of the story which belongs to the town as my own. Let me therefore quote a little from that book:—
“Our playground was a quiet place, especially at our end, where the town children, to whom the ramparts elsewhere were the chief place of recreation, seldom resorted. There were earthworks planted with trees and grass, and the meadows beneath were bright with buttercups and daisies. We were privileged children; we might run up and down the slopes or on the ramparts, or through the embrasures, or even clamber about the outer scarp down to the very edge of the moat, without rebuke from the ‘Johnnies,’ the official guardians of the walls, who went about all day armed with canes to keep boys from tearing down the earthworks. It was this privilege, as well as the general convenience of the place for children to play in, which took us nearly everyday to the Queen’s Bastion. There never was a more delightful retreat. In summer the trees afforded shade, and in winter the rampart gave shelter. You were in a solitude almost unbroken, close to a great centre of life and busy work; you looked out upon the world beyond, where there were fields, gardens, and trees; there was our own round corner, with the stately elms above us; the banks of grass, all sorts of grass, as one finds where there is no cultivation, trembling grass, foxtail grass, and that soft, bushy grass for which we had no name; there was the gun mounted on its high carriage, gazing out upon the harbour, a one-eyed Polyphemus longing for human food.
“We (Leonard, Celia, and Ladislas Pulaski, who tells the story) were standing, as I said, in the north-west corner of the Queen’s Bastion, the spot where the grass was longest and greenest, the wild convolvulus most abundant, and where the noblest of the great elms which stood upon the ramparts—‘to catch the enemy’s shells,’ said Leonard—threw out a gracious arm laden with leafy foliage to give a shade. We called the place Celia’s Arbour.
“If you looked out over the parapet, you saw before you the whole of the most magnificent harbour in the world; and if you looked through the embrasure of the wall, you had a splendid framed picture—water for foreground, old ruined castle in middle distance, blue hill beyond, and above blue sky.
“We were all three silent, because it was Leonard’s last evening with us. He was going away, our companion and brother, and we were there to bid him God speed.
“It was after eight; suddenly the sun, which a moment before was a great disc of burnished gold, sank below the thin line of land between sky and sea.
“Then the evening gun from the Duke of York’s Bastion proclaimed the death of another day with a loud report, which made the branches in the trees above us to shake and tremble. And from the barracks in the town; from the Harbour Admiral’s flagship; from the Port Admiral’s flagship; from the flagship of the Admiral in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, then in harbour; from the tower of the old church, there came such a firing of muskets, such a beating of drums, playing of fifes, ringing of bells, and sounding of trumpets, that you would have thought the sun was setting once for all, and receiving his farewell salute from a world he was leaving forever to roll about in darkness.
“The evening gun and the tintamarre that followed roused us all three, and we involuntarily turned to look across the parapet. Beyond that was the moat, and beyond the moat was a ravelin, and beyond the ravelin the sea-wall; beyond the wall a smooth and placid lake, for it was high tide, four miles long, and a couple of miles wide, in which the splendour of the west was reflected so that it looked like a furnace of molten metal. At low tide it would have been a great flat level of black mud, unlovely even with an evening sky upon it, intersected with creeks and streams which, I suppose, were kept full of water by the drainage of the mud-banks.
“At the end of the harbour stood the old ruined castle, on the very margin and verge of the water. The walls were reflected in the calm bosom of the lagoon; the water-gate opened out upon the wavelets of the lapping tide; behind rose the great donjon, square, grey, and massive; in the tourney-yard stood the old church, and we needed no telling to make us think of the walls behind, four feet broad, rugged and worn by the tooth of Time, thickly blossoming with gilly-flowers, clutched and held on all sides by the tight embrace of the ivy. There had been rain in the afternoon, so that the air was clear and transparent, and you could see every stone in the grand old keep, every dentation of the wall.
“Behind the castle lay the low curved line of a long hill, green and grassy, which made a background to the harbour and the old fortress. It stretched for six miles, this hill, and might have been monotonous but for the chalk quarries which studded its side with frequent intervals of white. Farther on, to the west, there lay a village, buried in a great clump of trees, so that you could see nothing but the tower of a church and the occasional smoke of a chimney. The village was so far off that it seemed like some outlying fort, an advance work of civilisation, an outpost such as those which the Roman conquerors have left in the desert. When your eye left the village among the trees and travelled southwards, you could see very little of land on the other side by reason of the ships which intervened—ships of every age, of every class, of every colour, of every build; frigates, three-deckers, brigs, schooners, cutters, launches, gunboats, paddle-wheel steamers, screw steamers, hulks so old as to be almost shapeless—they were lying ranged in line, or they w6re moored separately; some in the full flood of the waning sunset, some in shadow, one behind the other, making deep blacknesses in the golden water. There was not much life at this late hour in the harbour. Here and there a boat pulled by two or three lads from the town; here and there a great ship’s gig, moving heavily through the water, pulled by a crew of sailors, rowing with their slow and measured stroke, and the little middy sitting in the stern; or perhaps a wherry coming down from Fareham Creek. But mostly the harbour was silent, the bustle at the lower end having ceased with the sunset.”
Later on it was a practice to go once a year with a small party to Porchester. The visit was timed for the holiday of a certain D. A——, a civil servant of some department in London. He took his holiday in July or August, and used to join our little excursion, which he made merry by a thousand jokes and quips and quirks. He was always in good spirits and always ready with a laugh. We got to Porchester by boat, if the tide served; if not, by rail part of the way and walking the rest. No one can ever be tired of Porchester. There are the old Roman walls, with their hollow bastions. One side faces the harbour, the magnus portus, with a water gate; on the other side is a moat of Plantagenet addition. In one corner is a long narrow church with Saxon details, but rebuilt by the Normans; in its churchyard lie not only the bones of men-at-arms from the garrison and the rude forefathers of the hamlet, but also those of hundreds of French prisoners kept here during the long war of 1795–1815. A whole regiment of West Indian negroes—prisoners of war—died in one winter, and were buried in this churchyard. In another corner is a Norman castle, with its tall keep and its inner bastion. On our annual visit we began by climbing to the roof of the keep and by walking round the walls and looking into the chambers; this done, we had tea in one of the houses outside the walls. There was no tea like the Porchester tea; no bread like that of this happy village; no butter, no cake, no shrimps comparable with theirs. After tea we walked home—seven miles. Presently the sun went down: then the tall trees stood up against the sky like giants with long arms threatening; the air became mysterious, charged with sounds the meaning of which we could not catch; there were muffled notes of birds; silly cockchafers buzzed about and flew in our faces. The party became silent, even D. A—— ceased to make jokes; and the long mysterious march in the summer twilight lingers in my memory for the solemn joy, the sense of mystery, the feeling of the life invisible which fell upon one at least of that small company.
My father, who was born in the year 1800, in the first month of the last year of the 18th century, could remember very well the French prisoners at Porchester. As a boy he would take a boat up the harbour and go to the castle to see the prisoners. He spoke of their vivacity, their little industries—they made all kinds of ingenious things—and their friendliness with the boys, who laughed at their lingo and tried to make them understand English. Somewhere about the year 1883 or so, I wrote a story called The Holy Rose, in which I laid the scene partly in the village and castle of Porchester:—
“The village of Porchester is a place of great antiquity, but it is little, and except for its old Castle of no account. Its houses are all contained in a single street, beginning at the Castle-gate and ending long before you reach the Portsmouth and Fareham road, which is only a quarter of a mile from the Castle. Most of them are mere cottages, with thatched or red-tiled roofs, but they are not mean or squalid cottages; the folk are well-to-do, though humble, and every house in the village, small or great, is covered all over, back and front, with climbing roses. The roses cluster over the porches, they climb over the red tiles, they peep into the latticed windows, they cover and almost hide the chimney. In the summer months the air is heavy with their perfume; every cottage is a bower of roses; the flowers linger sometimes far into the autumn, and come again with the first warm days of June. Nowhere in the country, I am sure, though I have seen a few other places, is there such a village for roses. Apart from its flowers, I confess that the place has little worthy of notice; it cannot even show a church, because its church is within the Castle walls, and quite hidden from the village. The Castle, which, now that the long wars are over, one hopes for many years, is silent and deserted, its ruined courts empty, its crumbling walls left to decay, presented a different appearance indeed in the spring of the year 1802. For in those days it was garrisoned by two regiments of militia, and was occupied by the prodigious number of eight thousand prisoners.
“I am told that there are other ancient castles in the country even more extensive and more stately than Porchester; but I have never seen them, and am quite satisfied to believe that for grandeur, extent, and the awe of antiquity, there can be none which can surpass, and few which can pretend to equal, this monument. It is certainly ruinous in parts, yet still so strong as to serve for a great prison, but it is not overthrown, and its crumbling walls, broken roofs, and dismantled chambers surround the place with a solemnity which affects the most careless visitor.
“It is so ancient that there are some who pretend that parts of it may belong to British times, while it is certain that the whole of the outer wall was built by the Romans. In imitation of their camps, it stands four-square, and has hollow round towers in the sides and at the corners. The spot was chosen, not at the mouth of the harbour—the Britons having no means of attacking ships entering or going out—but at the very head of the harbour, where the creek runs up between the shallows, which are banks of mud at low water. Hither came the Roman galleys, laden with military stores, to land them under the protection of the Castle. When the Romans went away, and the Saxons came, who loved not fighting behind walls, they neglected the fortress, but built a church within the walls, and there laid their dead. When in their turn the Normans came, they built a castle after their own fashion, within the Roman walls. This is the stronghold, containing four square towers and a fortified entrance. And the Normans built the water-gate, and the gate-tower. The rest of the great space became the outer bailey of the Castle. They also added battlements to the wall, and dug a moat, which they filled with sea-water at high tide.
“The battlements of the Normans are now broken down or crumbling away; great patches of the rubble work have fallen here and there. Yet one can walk round the narrow ledge designed for the bowmen. The wall is crowned with waving grass and wallflowers, and up the sides grow elder-bushes, blackberry, ivy, and bramble, as luxuriantly as in any hedge beyond Portsdown. If you step out through the water-gate, which is now roofless, with little left to show its former splendour, except a single massive column, you will find, at high tide, the water lapping the lowest stones of the towers, just as it did when the Romans built them. Instead of the old galleys, which must have been light in draught to come up Porchester Creek, there are now lying half a dozen boats, the whole fleet of the little village. On the other side of the water are the wooded islets of Great and Little Horsea, and I suppose they look today much as they did a thousand years ago. On this side you look towards the east; but if you get to the south side of the Castle, and walk across a narrow meadow which lies between the wall and the sea, you have a very different view. For you look straight across the harbour to its very mouth, three miles away; you gaze upon a forest of masts and upon ships of every kind, from the stately man-o’-war to the saucy pink, and, twenty years ago, of every nation—because, in those days, we seemed at war with half the world—from the French-built frigate, the most beautiful ship that floats, to the Mediterranean xebecque, all of them prizes. Here they lie, some ready for sea, some just arrived, some battered by shot, some newly repaired and fresh from the yard; some—it seems a cruel fate for ships which have fought the battles of their country—converted into hulks for convicts and for prisoners; some store-ships—why, there is no end to the number and the kind of the ships lying in the harbour. They could tell, if they could speak, of many a battle and many a storm; some of them are as old as the days of Admiral Benbow; one poor old hulk is so old that she was once a man-o’-war in the Dutch wars of Charles II, and carried on board, it is said, the Duke of York himself.”
I have put so much of my own childhood into that book that I must quote from it again presently.
Shortly after this story appeared I received a visit from a lady who told me a little anecdote and made me a little present. “In the year 1803,” she said, with the solemnity and importance which belonged to what she was about to give me, “when the war broke out again and Napoleon detained all the English travellers or visitors in France, my very dear old friend X. Y. was engaged to be married. Her lover, however, who was then in Paris, was taken prisoner, although a civilian, and made to live at Verdun for eleven long years. The marriage was put off until he regained his liberty. Meantime my friend, with a fellow feeling for all prisoners, took lodgings at Portsmouth, and went by boat to Porchester Castle everyday. Here she occupied herself, being the kindest and dearest of all women, in nursing the sick prisoners until the Peace of 1814 restored her lover. Among other things which, at her death, she bequeathed me, was a collection of things made by the French prisoners, and either bought by her or given to her. Among them is a dainty little box made of straw, with a piece of looking-glass in the lid. As you have written a story about the prisoners, I have brought it, and now give it to you. I want you to give it to your eldest daughter, and I will ask her to keep it in memory of those poor prisoners and my dear friend who helped them.”
A pretty story and a pretty gift. I gave it to my daughter, who keeps it among her treasures.
In childhood, however, these things were as yet distant. It was enough to climb on the gun-carriage and to look out across the harbour upon the Castle and the Hill. There were flowers on the walls: the little pimpernel; the daisy; the buttercup; the dandelion (which was not to be picked, for some superstition); and, above all, the sweet and fragrant flower that we called the wild lily—the wild convolvulus. This grew everywhere; on all the slopes and among all the bastions we gathered it by handfuls. I have always loved the perfume of this sweet flower. To this day, when I gather one of these flowers the fragrance sends me back to that old bastion, and I am once more standing, hoop in hand, looking across the harbour, my childish brain full of fancies and wonderings and vague longings, and a sense which has never left me that life is a great and wonderful gift, and that the Lord made His children for happiness. I do not say that this fine sentiment was clothed in words. But it was there—one of the long, long thoughts of childhood.
In my novel By Celia’s Arbour, the narrator was a Pole, a son of one of the Polish exiles. I placed him under the care of a sailor’s widow—a washerwoman—in order to describe the quarter; it was in Portsea, about which I rambled as a boy, looking at the odd and pretty things which the sailors brought home, and their wives put in the windows.
“Mrs. Jeram was a weekly tenant in one of a row of small four-roomed houses known as Victory Row, which led out of Nelson Street, and was a broad, blind court, bounded on one side and at the end by the Dockyard wall. It was not a dirty and confined court, but quite the reverse, being large, clean, and a very Cathedral Close for quietness. The wall, built of a warm red brick, had a broad and sloping top, on which grew wallflowers, long grasses, and stonecrop; overhanging the wall was a row of great elms, in the branches of which there was a rookery, so that all day long you could listen, if you wished, to the talk of the rooks. Now this is never querulous, angry, or argumentative. The rook does not combat an adversary’s opinion; he merely states his own; if the other one does not agree with him he states it again, but without temper. If you watch them and listen, you will come to the conclusion that they are not theorists, like poor humans, but simply investigators of fact. It has a restful sound, the talk of rooks; you listen in the early morning, and they assist your sleeping half-dream without waking you; or in the evening they carry your imagination away to woods and sweet country glades. They have cut down the elms now, and driven the rooks to find another shelter. Very likely, in their desire to sweep away everything that is pretty, they have torn the wallflowers and grasses off the wall as well. And if these are gone, no doubt Victory Row has lost its only charm. If I were to visit it now, I should probably find it squalid and mean. The eating of the tree of knowledge so often makes things that once we loved look squalid.
“But to childhood nothing is unlovely in which the imagination can light upon something to feed it. It is the blessed province of all children, high and low, to find themselves at the gates of Paradise, and quite certainly Tom the Piper’s son, sitting under a hedge with a raw potato for plaything, is every bit as happy as a little Prince of Wales. The possibilities of the world which opens out before us are infinite; while the glories of the world we have left behind are still clinging to the brain, and shed a supernatural colouring on everything. At six, it is enough to live; to awake in the morning to the joy of another day; to eat, sleep, play, and wonder; to revel in the vanities of childhood; to wanton in make-belief superiority; to admire the deeds of bigger children; to emulate them, like Icarus; and too often, like that greatly daring youth, to fall.
“Try to remember, if you can, something of the mental attitude of childhood; recall, if you may, some of the long thoughts of early days. To begin with—God was quite close to you, up among the stars; He was seated somewhere, ready to give you whatever you wanted; everybody was a friend, and everybody was occupied all day long about your personal concerns; you had not yet arrived at the boyishness of forming plans for the future. You were still engaged in imitating, exercising, wondering. Every man was a demi-god—you had not yet arrived at the consciousness that you might become yourself a man; the resources of a woman—to whom belong bread, butter, sugar, cake, and jam—were unbounded; everything that you saw was full of strange and mysterious interest. You had not yet learned to sneer, to criticise, to compare, and to down-cry.
“Mrs. Jeram’s house, therefore, in my eyes, contained everything the heart of man could crave for. The green-painted door opened into a room which was at once reception-room, dining-room, and kitchen; furnished, too, though that I did not know, in anticipation of the present fashion, having plates of blue and white china stuck round the walls. The walls were built of that warm red brick which time covers with a coating of grey-like moss. You find it everywhere among the old houses of the south of England; but I suppose the clay is all used up, because I see none of it in the new houses.
“We were quite respectable people in Victory Row; of that I am quite sure, because Mrs. Jeram would have made the place much too lively, by the power and persistence of her tongue, for other than respectable people. We were seafaring folk, of course; and in every house was something strange from foreign parts. To this day I never see anything new in London shops or in museums without a backward rush of associations which lands me once more in Victory Row; for the sailors’ wives had all these things long ago, before inland people ever heard of them. There were Japanese cabinets, picked up in Chinese ports long before Japan was open; there was curious carved wood and ivory work from Canton. These things were got during the Chinese war. And there was a public-house in a street hard by which was decorated, instead of with a red window-blind, like other such establishments, with a splendid picture representing some of the episodes in that struggle; all the Chinese were running away in a disgraceful stampede, while Jack Tar, running after them, caught hold of their pigtails with the left hand, and deftly cut off their heads with the right, administering at the same time a frolicsome kick. John Chinaman’s legs were generally both off the ground together, such was his fear. Then there were carved ostrich eggs; wonderful things from the Brazils in feathers; frail delicacies in coral from the Philippines, known as Venus’s flower-baskets; gruesome-looking cases from the West Indies, containing centipedes, scorpions, beetles, and tarantulas; small turtle shells, dried flying-fish, which came out in moist exudations during wet weather, and smelt like haddock; shells of all kinds, big and little; clubs, tomahawks, and other queer weapons, carved in wood, from the Pacific; stuffed humming-birds, and birds of Paradise. There were live birds, too—avvadavats, Java sparrows, lovebirds, parroquets, and parrots in plenty. There was one parrot, at the corner house, which affected the ways of one suffering from incurable consumption—he was considered intensely comic by children and persons of strong stomach and small imagination. There were parrots who came, stayed a little while, and then were taken away and sold, who spoke foreign tongues with amazing volubility, who swore worse than Gresset’s Vert Vert, and who whistled as beautifully as a boatswain—the same airs, too. The specimens which belonged to Art or inanimate Nature were ranged upon a table at the window. They generally stood or were grouped round a large Bible, which it was a point of ceremonial to have in the house. The live birds were hung outside in sunny weather, all except the parrot with the perpetual cold, who walked up and down the court by himself and coughed. The streets surrounding us were, like our own, principally inhabited by mariners and their families, and presented similar characteristics; so that one moved about in a great museum, open for general inspection during daylight, and free for all the world. Certain I am that if all the rare and curious things displayed in these windows had been collected and preserved, the town would have had a most characteristic and remarkable museum of its own.
“Among my early friends were one or two of the Polish exiles and refugees who lived at Portsmouth and were pensioned by our Government. The man called Wassielewski was my especial friend.
“They had a great barrack all to themselves, close to the walls, whither I used to be sometimes carried. It was a narrow building, built of black-tarred wood, with windows at both sides, so that you saw the light quite through the house.
“It stood just under the walls, almost in the shade of the great elms. Within it were upwards of a hundred Poles, living chiefly on the tenpence a day which the English Government allowed them for their support, with this barn-like structure to house them. They were desperately poor, all of them living mostly on bread and frugal cabbage-soup. Out of their poverty, out of their tenpence a day, some of these poor fellows found means by clubbing together to pay Mrs. Jeram, week by week, for my support. They went hungry that I might eat and thrive; they came everyday, some of them, to see that I was well cared for. They took me to their barrack, and made me their pet and plaything; there was nothing they were not ready to do for me, because I was the child of Roman Pulaski and Claudia his wife.
“The one who came oftenest, stayed the longest, and seemed in an especial manner to be my guardian, was a man who was grey when I first remember him. He had long hair and a full grey beard. There was a great red gash in his cheek, which turned white when he grew excited or was moved. He limped with one foot, because some musket ball had struck him in the heel; and he had singularly deep-set eyes, with heavy eyebrows. I have never seen anything like the sorrowfulness of Wassielewski’s eyes. Other Poles had reason for sorrow. They were all exiles together, they were separated from their families, without a hope that the terrible Nicolas, who hated a rebel Pole with all the strength of his autocratic hatred, would ever let them return; they were all in poverty, but these men looked happy. Wassielewski alone never smiled, and carried always that low light of melancholy in his eyes, as if not only the past was sad, but the future was charged with more sorrow. On one day in the year he brought me immortelles, tied with a black ribbon. He told me they were in memory of my father, Roman Pulaski, now dead and in heaven, and of my mother, also dead, and now sitting among the saints and martyrs. I used to wonder at those times to see the eyes which rested on me so tenderly melt and fill with tears.
“My early childhood, spent among these kindly people, was thus very rich in the things which stimulate the imagination. Strange and rare objects in every house, in every street something from far-off lands, talk to be heard of foreign ports and bygone battles, the poor Poles in their bare and gaunt barracks, and then the place itself. I have spoken of the rookery beyond the flower-grown Dockyard wall. But beyond the rookery was the Dockyard itself, quiet and orderly, which I could see from the upper window of the house. There was the Long Row, where resided the Heads of Departments; the Short Row, in which lived functionaries of lower rank—I believe the two Rows do not know each other in society; there was the great reservoir, supported on tall and spidery legs, beneath which stood piles of wood cut and dressed, and stacked for use; there was the Rope Walk, a quarter of a mile long, in which I knew walked incessantly up and down the workmen who turned hanks of yarn into strong cables smelling of fresh tar; there were the buildings where other workmen made blocks, bent beams, shaped all the parts of ships; there were the great places where they made and repaired machinery; there were the sheds themselves, where the mighty ships grew slowly day by day, miracles of man’s constructive skill, in the dim twilight of their wooden cradles; there was a pool of sea water in which lay timber to be seasoned, and sometimes I saw boys paddling up and down in it; there was always the busy crowd of officers and sailors going up and down, some of them god-like, with cocked hats, epaulettes and swords.
“And all day long, never ceasing, the busy sound of the Yard. To strangers and visitors it was just a confused and deafening noise. When you got to know it, you distinguished half-a-dozen distinct sounds which made up that inharmonious and yet not unpleasing whole. There was the chatter of the caulkers’ mallets, which never cease their tap, tap, tap, until you got used to the regular beat, and felt it no more than you feel the beating of your pulse. But it was a main part of the noise which made the life of the Yard. Next to the multitudinous mallets of the caulkers, which were like the never-ceasing hum and whisper of insects on a hot day, came the loud clanging of the hammer from the boiler-makers’ shop. That might be likened, by a stretch of fancy, to the crowing of cocks in a farmyard. Then, all by itself, came a heavy thud which made the earth tremble, echoed all around, and silenced for a moment everything else. It came from the Nasmyth steam hammer; and always running through all, and yet distinct, the r-r-r-r of the machinery, like the rustling of the leaves in the wind. Of course I say nothing about salutes, because everyday a salute of some kind was thundering and rolling about the air as the ships came and went, each as tenacious of her number of guns as an Indian Rajah.
“Beyond the Dockyard—you could not see it, but you felt it, and knew that it was there—was the broad blue lake of the harbour, crowded with old ships sacred to the memory of a hundred fights, lying in stately idleness, waiting for the fiat of some ignorant and meddling First Lord ordering them to be broken up. As if it were anything short of wickedness to break up any single ship which has fought the country’s battles and won her victories, until the tooth of Time, aided by barnacles, shall have rendered it impossible for her to keep afloat any longer.
“When the last bell rang at six o’clock, and the workmen went away, all became quiet in the Dockyard. A great stillness began suddenly, and reigned there till the morning, unbroken save by the rooks which cawed in the elms, and the clock which struck the hours. And then one had to fall back on the less imaginative noises of Victory Row, where the parrot coughed, and the grass widows gathered together, talking and disputing in shrill concert, and Leonard fought Moses before going to bed, not without some din of battle.”
In the same novel I have described the Common Hard, as I remember it in my childhood as follows:—
“The Common Hard, is still, after all the modern changes, a street with a distinct character of its own. The houses still look out upon the bright and busy harbour, though there is now a railway terminus and an ugly pier; though steam launches run across the water; and though there are telegraph posts, cabs, and omnibuses, all the outward signs of advanced civilisation. But thirty years ago it was a place which seemed to belong to the previous century. There were no great houses and handsome shops, but in their place a picturesque row of irregular cottages, no two of which were exactly alike, but which resembled each other in certain particulars. They were two-storeyed houses; the upper storey was very low, the ground-floor was below the level of the street. I do not know why, but the fact remains that in my town the ground-floors of all the old houses were below the level of the pavement. You had to stoop, if you were tall, to get into the doorway, and then, unless you were experienced, you generally fell headlong down a step of a foot or so. Unless the houses were shops they had only one window below and one above, because the tax on windows obliged people to economise their light. The roofs were of red tiles, high-pitched, and generally broken-backed; stone-crop and house-leek grew upon them. The Hard existed then only for the sailors. There were one or two jewellers who bought as well as sold; many public-houses, and a plentiful supply of rascally pay-agents. That side had little interest for boys. In old times the high tide had washed right up to the foot of these houses, which then stood upon the beach itself. But they built a stone wall, which kept back the water, and allowed a road to be made, protected by an iron railing. An open space gave access to what was called the ‘beach,’ being a narrow spit of land, along which were ranged on either side the wherries of the boatmen. A wooden bench was placed along the iron railings near the beach, on which sat everyday and all day long old sailors, in a row. It was their club, their daily rendezvous, the place where they discussed old battles, smoked pipes, and lamented bygone days. They never seemed to walk about or to care much where they sat. They sat still, and sat steadily, in hot weather and in cold. The oddest thing about this line of veterans was that they all seemed to have wooden legs. There was, or there exists in my memory, which is the same thing, a row of wooden pegs which did duty for the lost legs, sticking out straight in front of the bench when they were on it. The effect of this was very remarkable. Some, of course, had lost other outlying bits of the human frame; a hand, the place supplied by a hook, like that of Cap’en Cuttle, whose acquaintance I formed later on; a whole arm, its absence marked by the empty sleeve sewn to the front of the jersey; and there were scars in plenty. Like my friends the Poles, these heroes had gained their scars and lost their limbs in action.
“Thirty years ago we were only a quarter of a century or so from the long and mighty struggle which lasted for a whole generation, and filled this seaport town with prosperity, self-satisfaction, and happiness. Oh, for the brave old days when week after week French, American, Spanish, and Dutch prizes were towed into harbour by their victors, or sailed in, the Union Jack flying at the peak, the original crew safe under hatches, in command of a middy, and half-a-dozen British sailors told off to take her home. They talked, these old grizzle-heads, of fights and convoys, and perilous times afloat. I sat among them, or stood in front of them, and listened. Child as I was, my little heart glowed to hear how, yardarm to yardarm, they lay alongside the Frenchman; how a dozen times over the plucky little French beggars tried to board them; how she sheered off at last, and they followed, raking her fore and aft; how she suddenly broke out into flame, and before you could say ‘Jack Robinson,’ blew up, with all that was left of a thousand men aboard; with merry yarns of Chinese pigtails, made to be pulled by the British sailor, and niggers of Jamaica, and Dutchmen at the Cape. Also, what stories of slavers, of catching American skippers in the very act of chucking the niggers overboard, of cutting out Arab dhows, of sailing in picturesque waters where the natives swim about in the deep like porpoises; of boat expeditions up silent rivers in search of piratical Malays; of lying frozen for months in Arctic regions, long before they thought of calling men heroes for passing a single winter on the ice with every modern appliance for making things comfortable.
Here is a picture of a scene which I often witnessed—feast and merriment, mad and loud and furious, and full of things to make the moralist weep. I have stood at the open door, looking in for half an hour at a time at the sailors dancing hornpipes and the girls dancing jigs, and all singing and drinking together. Do you suppose it does a child any harm to see such things? Not a bit, so long as he knows not what such things mean; the thing is like a lovely act in a beautiful play: the music of the fiddles is heavenly, the laughter and the joy of the nymphs and sailors is like a part of Paradise. I quote from By Celia’s Arbour.
“We came to a public-house; that one with the picture outside it of the Chinese war. There was a long, low sort of hall within it, at the end of which Wassielewski took his place, and began to fiddle again. Dancing then set in, though it was still early in the morning, with great severity. With dancing, drink; with both, songs; with all three, Wassielewski’s fiddle. I suppose it was the commencement of a drunken orgie, and the whole thing was disgraceful. Remember, however, that it was more than thirty years ago, when the Navy still retained its old traditions. Foremost among them was the tradition that being ashore meant drink as long as the money lasted. It sometimes lasted a week, or even a fortnight, and was sometimes got through in a day or two. There were harpies and pirates in every house which was open to Jack. Jack, indeed, was cheated wherever he went. Afloat, he was robbed by the purser; he was ill-fed and found, the Government paying for good food and good stores, contractors and purveyors combining with the purser to defraud him. Ashore, he was horribly, shamefully cheated and robbed when he was paid off by a Navy bill, and fell into the hands of the pay agents. He was a rough-hided ruffian, who could fight, had seen plenty of fighting, was tolerably inured to every kind of climate, and ready to laugh at any kind of danger, except, perhaps, Yellow Jack. He was also tender-hearted and sentimental. Sometimes he was away for five years at a stretch, and, if his Captain chose to make it so, his life was a dog’s life. Floggings were frequent; rum was the reward of good conduct; there were no Sailors’ Homes, none of the many humanising influences which have made the British sailor the quiet, decorous creature, generally a teetotaller, and often inclined to a Methodist way of thinking in religion, half soldier, half sailor, that he is at present.
“It was an orgie, I suppose, at which no child should have been present. Fortunately, at half-past twelve, the landlord piped all hands for dinner.”
I made friends, of course, with the veterans. Sometimes I ventured on a little offering of tobacco. One of them, a very ancient mariner, used always to declare that he had been cabin boy under Captain Cook when that great navigator was murdered. It was possible. The time when I knew this venerable old salt was about the year 1848. Cook died in 1779. If my friend was born in 1765 he might very well have been a cabin boy in 1779. And in 1848 he would have been eighty-three years of age. A good many of these old sailors lived to be past eighty. Of course, all these veterans belonged to the long wars of 1795–1815.
Another recollection. There were convict hulks in the harbour; the convicts were set to do the work of excavating, etc., for docks, and other things of the kind. Of course they were closely watched by warders armed with loaded muskets. Now there was one thing which these poor wretches ardently desired—tobacco. To give tobacco to a convict was, of course, forbidden, or to speak to him or to make any kind of communication to them. It was my practice, therefore, to get a lump of the rough, strong roll tobacco, put it in my pocket and loiter about as near to a convict as I could get without exciting suspicion. The man for his part would work in my direction; he knew perfectly well what was intended. I waited until the nearest warder had his eyes the other way, and then jerked the quid as near the convict as I could. He raised his spade and began to scrape the instrument as if something was in the way. Then he put his foot on the quid, scraped again, and stooping in the most natural way in the world, as if to get rid of a stone, he picked up the quid and continued his work—watching the warder. As soon as his eye was turned, he put the quid in his mouth, and for the remainder of that day, certainly, he was a happy man.