“London Bridge is Falling Down”
Arthur Hobhouse is a Happening
I should begin at the beginning, I know that. But the trouble is that I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did. I do know my name, Arthur Hobhouse. Arthur Hobhouse had a beginning, that’s for certain. I had a father and a mother too, but God only knows who they were, and maybe even he doesn’t know for sure. I mean, God can’t be looking everywhere all at once, can he? So where the name Arthur Hobhouse comes from and who gave it to me I have no idea. I don’t even know if it’s my real name. I don’t know the date and place of my birth either, only that it was probably in Bermondsey, London, sometime in about 1940.
The earliest memories I have are all confused somehow, and out of focus. For instance, I’ve always known I had a sister, an older sister. All my life she’s been somewhere in the deepest recesses either of my memory or my imagination – sometimes I can’t really be sure which – and she was called Kitty. When they sent me away, she wasn’t with me. I wish I knew why. I try to picture her, and sometimes I can. I see a pale delicate face with deep dark eyes that are filled with tears. She is giving me a small key, but I don’t remember what the key is for. It’s on a piece of string. She hangs it round my neck, and tells me I’m to wear it always. And then sometimes I hear her laugh, an infectious giggle that winds itself up into a joyous cackle. My sister cackles like a kookaburra. She comes skipping into my dreams sometimes, singing London Bridge is Falling Down, and I try to talk to her, but she never seems to be able to hear me. Somehow we’re always just out of reach of one another.
All my earliest memories are very like dreams. I know that none of them are proper memories, none that I could really call my own anyway. I feel I’ve come out of half-forgotten, half-remembered times, and I’m sure I’ve often filled the half-forgotten times with made-up memories. Perhaps it’s my mind trying to make some sense of the unknown. So I can’t know for certain where the made-up ones end and the real ones begin. All the earliest childhood memories must be like that for everyone I suppose, but maybe mine are more blurred than most, and maybe that’s because I have no family stories to support them, no hard facts, no real evidence, no certificates, not a single photograph. It’s almost as if I wasn’t born at all, that I just happened. Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I’ve been a happening for sixty-five years, or thereabouts, and the time has come now for me to put my life down on paper. For me this will be the birth certificate I never had. It’s to prove to me and to anyone else who reads it that at least I was here, that I happened.
I am a story as well as a happening, and I want my story to be known, for Kitty to know it – if she’s still alive. I want her to know what sort of a brother she had. I want Zita to know it too, although she knows me well enough already, I reckon, warts and all. Most of all I want Allie to know it, and for her children to know it, when they come along, and her children’s children too. I want them all to know who I was, that I was a happening and I was a story too. This way I’ll live on in them. I’ll be part of their story, and I won’t be entirely forgotten when I go. That’s important to me. I think that’s the only kind of immortality we can have, that we stay alive only as long as our story goes on being told. So I’m going to sit here by the window for as long as it takes and tell it all just as I remember it.
They say you can’t begin a story without knowing the end. Until recently I didn’t know the end, but now I do. So I can begin, and I’ll begin from the very first day I can be sure I really remember. I’d have been about six years old. Strange that the memories of youth linger long, stay vivid, perhaps because we live our young lives more intensely. Everything is fresh and for the first time, and unforgettable. And we have more time just to stand and stare. Strange too that events of my more recent years, my adult years, are more clouded, less distinct. Time gathers speed as we get older. Life flashes by all too fast, and is over all too soon.
Three Red Funnels and an Orchestra
There were dozens of us on the ship, all ages, boys and girls, and we were all up on deck for the leaving of Liverpool, gulls wheeling and crying over our heads, calling goodbye. I thought they were waving goodbye. None of us spoke. It was a grey day with drizzle in the air, the great sad cranes bowing to the ship from the docks as we steamed past. That’s all I remember of England.
The deck shuddered under our feet. The engines thundered and throbbed as the great ship turned slowly and made for the open sea ahead, the mist rolling in from the horizon. The nuns had told us we were off to Australia, but it might as well have been to the moon. I had no idea where Australia was. All I knew at the time was that the ship was taking me away, somewhere far away over the ocean. The ship’s siren sounded again and again, deafening me even though I had my hands over my ears. When it was over I clutched the key around my neck, the key Kitty had given me, and I promised myself and promised her I’d come back home one day. I felt in me at that moment a sadness so deep that it has never left me since. But I felt too that just so long as I had Kitty’s key, it would be lucky for me, and I would be all right.
I suppose we must have gone by way of the Suez Canal. I know that most of the great liners bound for Australia did in those days. But I can’t say I remember it. There’s a lot I do remember though: the three pillar-box-red funnels, the sound of the orchestra playing from first class where we weren’t allowed to go – once they even played London Bridge is Falling Down and I loved that because it always made me happy when I heard it. I remember mountainous waves, higher than the deck of the ship, green or grey, or the deepest blue some days, schools of silver dancing dolphins, and always, even in the stormiest weather, seabirds skimming the waves, or floating high above the funnels. And there was the wide wide sea all around us going on it seemed to me for ever and ever, as wide as the sky itself. It was the wideness of it all I remember, and the stars at night, the millions of stars. But best of all I saw my first albatross. He flew out of a shining wave one day, came right over my head and looked down deep into my eyes. I’ve never forgotten that.
The ship was, in a way, my first home, because it was the first home I can remember. We slept two to a bunk, a dozen or more of us packed into each cabin, deep down in the bowels of the ship, close to the pounding rhythm of the engines. It was cramped and hot down there and reeked of diesel and damp clothes, and there was often the stench of vomit too, a lot if it mine. I was in with a lot of other lads all of whom were older than me, some a lot older.
I was in trouble almost from the start. They called me a “softie” because I’d rock myself to sleep at night, humming London Bridge is Falling Down, and because I cried sometimes. Once one of them found out I wet