the dramatic society.’ But when he did so they made him play Ophelia, which was somehow or other unsatisfying. Later, he joined the debating society, and although he attacked the public school system with some apparent success, claiming that it deprived chaps of all individual attention at the most critical time of their lives, he was thereafter labelled as a pansy, and for some reason a socialist. His unpopularity was odd, considering his ready manner, and sometimes he would be asked why he deliberately made himself unpopular. He would always explode with a protesting laugh, but, unable to reply adequately, he would wander away to beat a tennis ball up against the wall by himself, and thinking: ‘As soon as I leave here I shall be popular all right!’ He attacked the system of imprisonment, instancing Dartmoor, rather well at another debate, but likened it to the public school system. For that, he had to run the gauntlet of wet towels dressed in his pyjama jacket.
Now, when he sometimes sat on a public platform, much more cautiously airing the same views, whatever he said seemed to be greeted with popular applause. He would wait confidently for his cue, knowing whatever he said would be successful. ‘… So I will now call upon Mr Ernest Bisham, the well-known announcer, who has very kindly come all the way to Manchester to be with us today!’ To a storm of applause, he would stand before a sea of curious faces, and he would proceed to get in as much of his views against prison life, and its silly inhumanity, or his views against the repulsive habit of flogging, without letting it be thought he was either a socialist or airing the views of the BBC. At the end, there would be another storm of applause, and silly faces would throng round him and voices would say: ‘We always listen when you read the news, Mr Bisham! My mother-in-law thinks your voice is by far the best!’ Not one of them cared the slightest about his views on anything, least of all sex life in prisons. But it amused him, as life amused him with its odd antics. When magazines asked him if they could print his photograph and an article about his life, he was studiously vague about certain years. It was strange how lumps of years could safely be dropped from an article. It was a technique. And it was often convenient. Impossible to say: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, during those years I was simply appallingly broke. I had the dreariest of jobs—until my father died, you know—mechanic, salesman, oh, and cat-burglar.’ One item would be very colourful. ‘I must tell you about the afternoon I walked into a jewel shop in the city. I asked to see some rings and the bloke showed me about ten on a narrow tray. I said, thanks, chum, and stuffed them in my pocket. I strolled out—you mustn’t run when you’re a professional thief—each moment expecting bells to ring and hands to seize my left shoulder. But the shopkeeper must have had one or two, for in about two seconds I was outside and lost in the crowds.’ An asterisk and italics at the bottom of the page could add, in a dignified way: ‘By the way, I sent the rings back. When I got home that desperate day I found I’d landed a job. And in any case it’s too risky trying to sell jewellery of that kind in London.’ Yes, indeed, and it was still a problem to know what to do with it. The prisons were full of blokes who had tried to solve this unsatisfactory problem. He often thought old Mrs Clarkson might have had some useful suggestion to make. Her house was full of the most shadowy, stooping characters. They would creep furtively up her dark stairs at all hours, not a few going to bed during the day instead of during the night. But he had never risked it. He went on doing various little cat burglaries, just for the thrill, and to prove his beliefs about never getting caught, and in the hopes that one day he would think of what to do with the proceeds. Sometimes he chucked the proceeds into the Thames when he got bored with looking at them. Now and then he sent later proceeds to insurance houses he felt he might have cost too dearly. Mrs Clarkson would be curious about his little newspaper parcels and think they were fish and chips. She would accuse him of not liking her food.
He didn’t know what he would have done without her help in the first days of his break with home. And he often wondered now if it was Mrs Clarkson who had first given him his interest in the word ‘bulletin’. She certainly brought regular news bulletins to him for several years, scurrying back to the shabby little Hammersmith house to say: ‘No, Master Ernest, I tried again—but he just won’t speak. We shall have to wait.’ When at last Mr Bisham Senior’s obituary did appear in The Times, his will was reported to have mentioned a figure as large as thirty-three thousand pounds—five of which he was obliged to leave to his son through his mother’s will. His son instantly got an advance, threw a lot of surplus jewellery into the Thames and drank gin with Mrs Clarkson until midnight, when they changed to draught Burton. By four o’clock in the morning they were both completely and contentedly under the weather. They lost no time declaring that the old man hadn’t been such a bad sort after all, erroneous though the belief was in the cold light of day, Mrs Clarkson insisting that he had been a sort of Dick Whittington in his younger days, ‘and very human about ladies, my dear, excepting his own family, that is.’ Mrs Clarkson did not at once let drop certain pending surprises about the Bisham family, but proceeded to read the story of Dick Whittington to Ernest Bisham, who sat in her brown armchair with his feet on the table. It was Mrs Clarkson reading it.
He was never very partial to Dick Whittington’s story, having no particular fancy for Lord Mayors or for cats, though Mayors were jovial fellows with plenty of food and cash, and Mrs Clarkson had a cat in her kitchen with a highly developed dramatic sense, being fond of springing from great heights across gaps of at least fifty feet, or hurtling itself from the very jaws of infuriated Hammersmith buses into the basement area.
Mrs Clarkson then slyly proceeded to make certain strange suggestions. She was going to have her house repainted, inside and out, and so Ernest was to take the opportunity, ‘now that dear father has passed away’, of going on a short visit to, ‘a sort of family relation, a kind of distant cousin, in another part of London’. She said she had always wanted to see Master Ernest, and she might turn out to be useful to him over a career, or something in that line, you never knew. Startled, for Ernest had been unaware of any such watching interests in his background, he cross-examined Mrs Clarkson in some detail. But all he got was: ‘Never mind about the whys and wherefores, dear. And don’t ask her any questions, either. She is very reserved and a little prim, as the saying goes. But she likes young people and is keen on educational matters. Go and stop with her, it can’t hurt, and I’ll get on with the house.’
She was called Miss Wisdon, and her house was in Chepstow Walk, Notting Hill Gate. It was hard saying good-bye to Mrs Clarkson, and to thank her for all she had done.
‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘And Miss Wisdon is quite decent. Don’t rub her up the wrong way.’
‘No,’ Ernest said.
‘And I expect her Mr Edwards will come and see you and see what he can do.’
‘Oh?’ he said, startled again.
‘Don’t rub him up the wrong way,’ she strongly advised him. ‘Then you’ll be all right.’
‘Yes. But who is he …?’
‘You’ll see in good time,’ she said. ‘Well, I’ll see you again soon. Be sure to write, or it will rub me up the wrong way.’
‘Yes, I will. Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye, dear,’ she said, and decided to kiss him, a little after the fashion of a mallet going conk up against a tub.
Conk!
Conk!
‘Well, good-bye, Master Ernest!’
‘Good-bye, Mrs Clarkson …!’
The parting seemed quite a sorrow, another rooting up. And although he did see her again soon, when the painting was finished, he had really said good-bye, for she died later that summer, and he was not again to live in the Hammersmith house.
He took a taxi to Miss Wisdon’s. He had been told she was ‘poorly’, or she would have come to collect him herself. He reached Miss Wisdon’s at six o’clock. He walked up the pathway of a tiny three-storied house. It was of the dimity variety, and in the garden were large stone toadstools. There was a note jutting out of the front door letter-box with his name on it explaining economically: ‘Pull string.’ He pulled and there was a long key on the other end, so he let himself in. In the little green glass hall was a second note propped