young scholars milling about in their uniforms. Fell into conversation with a crowd of youngsters headed for Tutankhamun exhibits who benefited, I felt, from my extemporised dilations on the Egyptian cult of worship and burial. Charming young teacher, no more than twenty-four, auburn curls, fetching dimple, was puzzled at first by my interest in her brood but responded to my little sermon on the misguided heathen fixation on Golden Sepulchres vs the Life Eternal.
One girl, charming blue eyes, shining teeth, asked about mummies and the binding of bodies – were they so apparelled, she asked, in order to meet their Maker in robes of white rather than black funeral shrouds? At a loss, momentarily, I explained they were so bound as to keep the late lamented from putrefaction while journeying homeward to Heaven’s door. Why, she asked, did not Christian burial ‘think also of wrapping up the dead so they’ll look their best’? I told her of the Four Last Things and the certain hope of resurrection, body intact, at the Day of Judgement. ‘But what will my body be like by then?’ she wailed. Her teacher, the dimpled one, took me aside and said that the poor child recently lost her uncle and should not be encouraged to brood on such things. I desisted, only telling her, as she was led away, that we will all met again, reconstituted in body and soul, looking as we did at our best in this life.
Passed down Museum Street, wondering if my explanation was theologically sound. When we meet again, all these Christian souls now disporting themselves in these sunlit thoroughfares, shall we all look as we look now? The teacher will never appear better than in her current incarnation. Nor the blue-eyed scholar, with her finely enamelled incisors. I myself will return on that awful day looking, I presume, as I do now, in my fifty-five-year-old prime. But others? It remains a puzzle. One for the Stiffkey pulpit, perhaps. Made note in Notebook 6 from Stationery Pocket.
Looked in at Museum Tea Rooms, but nothing. Glanced through windows of George’s Café in Coptic Street, received insipid wave from poor, defeated-looking Catherine, but I was not disposed to enter. Too awkward. One tries to provide pastoral aftercare, but I cannot stand bleatings about ‘lack of custom/why am I here/my life is slops and insult/O woe is me that I am not on the Hippodrome stage/you promised me this, you told me that’ etc. There is no fathoming the mystifying ingratitude of the Saved.
Walked to Southampton Row, looked in at Gerry’s Fishmonger’s and spoke with Sally Anstruther. ‘It’s a living, Harold,’ she said, ‘if you can stand gutting a sinkful of pollock at eight in the morning, but it’s not what I had in mind. There’s tea and biscuits at eleven. I’m not saying I’m not grateful. I just wish I didn’t always go home reeking of salt cod. Nothing will shake it off. They make fun o’ me in the Princess Louise.’
I pressed some Wrights Coal Tar soap into her hand and told her to pray for strength. ‘A present?’ she said. ‘I haven’t had nobody buy me soap since my mum died.’ Her buxom young frame seemed to heave with emotion. I have always been moved by the rural-milk-maid type, especially when seen in disarray, with a ringlet of sweaty blonde hair falling over one eye. Small, yet bursting with goodwill, her generous hips suggesting a natural disposition to child-rearing, Sally will do well when she finds a husband among the fish-loving customers of Bloomsbury, one who will not mind her daily delving in piscine entrails, when he is guaranteed each night the God-given delights of her unsheathed bosom.
I told her of my enquiries at the labour exchange for a position as lady’s maid in Chelsea, and she perked up appreciably. Gerald, the boorish owner, interrupted our sweet embraces and told her to get back to filleting the haddock or whatever duties she had to endure that morning, and I went away rejoicing. A delightful, almost-fulfilled woman with, at nineteen, a real future ahead of her.
Turned into Theobald’s Road, where motor carriages and omnibuses are more plentiful than I have ever seen them. Will everyone soon own a motor car? In Doughty Street, I paused at number 48, Chas Dickens’s house in 1837, the place where he wrote the latter part of Pickwick Papers, all of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and the beginning of Barnaby Rudge, and all in two and a half years. It opened to the public five years ago, and is a place of wonder to me. Such concentration and energy! I look at his first-floor study, the writing table, the lock of his hair, the ‘Dingly Dell Kitchen’ with its pewter plates and warming pans, the reading desk he valued so much it accompanied him on his travels to America when he was nearing the end of his labours. One naturally imagines him alone, writing day and night to produce such prodigious masterpieces of imagination, busily inflamed with social concern, as if that were all his occupation in this tiny cell. But here was also the birthing scene of his daughters Mamie and Kate, and all the chaos and swaddling and cloacal atmospherics of tiny babies.
I know well how one is torn between fond indulgence at such familial sights and smells, and the guilty licence one gives oneself to depart from them at any pretext, and plunge oneself into the less claustrophobic arena of other people’s problems.
I remember the winter day (was it 1907? ’08?) when Sheilagh was yet a baby, and I arrived home from an exhausting week in London to discover she had been left for the afternoon at old Nanny Sedgwick’s, two miles from home in the hamlet of Binham, while Mimi was visiting her sister, over from Dublin and staying in Norwich. Snow had been falling all day across East Anglia, and the journey home from Wells in the pony and trap was a slow progress through drifts of white powder, waist-high. Mimi was home a half-hour before me, weeping that the roads to Binham were impassable, and the tiny infant must remain overnight with her aged companion.
‘Mrs Sedgwick is a mother three times over, and will know how to cope,’ I reasoned. ‘It is nine o’clock and the child will sleep till dawn, whereupon Sam can be dispatched to bring her home.’ Mollified, she poked the fire, we talked for a while and she readied herself for bed. Then – I have never forgotten this extraordinary event – she emerged from the bathroom in disarray, crying ‘Harold! Harold!’ I rushed to her side. She stood in the bathroom doorway, clad in her long cotton nightdress from the Liberty department store.
‘What is it?’
‘Sheilagh has woken up, and you must go and fetch her home,’ she said in a tone of voice that brooked no demur.
‘How can you possibly know?’ I asked. ‘Are you a mind-reader?’
In answer, she gestured to the front of her night attire, where two damp patches made clammy circles over her nipple region. The mysteries of the female anatomy were never more mysterious to me than at that instant.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘Must I draw you a diagram?’ she cried. ‘Go and fetch her this minute!’
Understanding little of this mother-child collusion across the miles, I sought my bicycle, rejected it as no use in ferrying an infant, and telephoned Mr Phillips who plies a taxi service in the village. Twenty minutes later, we were stuck in an impassable snowdrift. Mr P handed me a shovel and together we dug the icy mounds from around the tyres and manoeuvred our craft – oh so slowly! – through the falling white Communion flakes.
Mrs Sedgwick greeted us like knights come to rescue a tiny Rapunzel from a castle. I took Sheilagh in my arms, swaddled in white blankets with young Anthony’s tweed cap protecting her membranous fontanelle, walked her through the icy path, treacherously frozen, and gained the taxi only after minutes of dangerous manoeuvre, skidding now this way now that, my free arm clinging to gatepost, fence and bramble hedge. My hands were frozen. I twice sank heavily to the icy cobbles, clutching my precious burden, trying to rise by the strength of my right arm alone, torn again and again on the thorns of the hedgerow. The brief distance to the taxi was, may God forgive the comparison, like the road to Calvary.
Mr Phillips rotated the starting handle, I bundled the baby into the back seat and we set off for home. The frozen engine began to roar, its note an angry crescendo of cold fury becoming hot passion in these frozen wastes. Exhilarated by the success of our rescue mission, I gazed at my firstborn and watched her sweet face as she woke, emerging from that unguessable foreign land of an infant’s dream. Her tulip mouth formed into a petulant moue and blew small, sucky kisses at the air. She was hungry. Mimi had been right, the secret evidence of her milky secretions confirmed. To distract the babe, I lifted her blanketed form in