Still life, p.1
Still Life, page 1
STILL LIFE
SKETCHES FROM
A TUNBRIDGE WELLS
CHILDHOOD
RICHARD COBB
TO
THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
The town is never over-run with trippers,
nor are its streets ever defiled by the vulgar or
the inane. Its inhabitants are composed,
for the most part, of well-to-do people who
naturally create social atmosphere tinged by
culture and refinement …
On its outskirts are many houses of the kind
that attract those members of the aristocracy
desirous of change of scene
after the ceaseless social duties of the
London season. Thus it may be taken for
granted that when London is ‘empty’ in
the society sense, Tunbridge Wells is
at its liveliest and best.
From Royal Tunbridge Wells:
The Official Guide, c.1923
CONTENTS
‘A BOUQUET FOR TUNBRIDGE WELLS’ BY J. C. Hall,
PREFACE,
1 THE APPROACH
2 LOCATIONS
3 ‘SUSSEX VIEW’
4 LITTLE MOUNT SION
5 GROVE HILL
6 MY MOTHER’S HOUSE
7 THE BLACK WIDOW
8 DR RANKING
9 KING CHARLES THE MARTYR
10 THE OUTSIDE WORLD
11 THE LIMBURY-BUSES
12 DOORS AND WINDOWS
13 THE OBSERVATORY
14 THE WAR MEMORIAL
15 FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
16 CUTTING CORNERS
17 THE SECRET MAP
18 THE KRUGER SOVEREIGN
19 THE SHIP
20 PICTURES
21 TEA AT MR EVANS’S
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Copyright
A BOUQUET FOR TUNBRIDGE WELLS
by
J. C. Hall
Once, twice a year if work and funds permit it,
I board the quarter-to at Charing Cross
And diesel down on yet another visit
To my Good Place. Over the river, gross
Acres of brick wheel by, suburbs in flight.
Past Knockholt, the travelling sense anticipates
The first enormous tunnel – sudden night
(In the Steam Age a purgatory of smuts),
Then sudden daylight bursting on a world
Of hops and orchards. Soon, burrowing under Knole,
Another tunnel; then down the levelling Weald
To Tonbridge, printing works, a public school
I nearly went to. Ten minutes more, I’m there
At Tunbridge Wells’ odd station, battened down
In a sort of hooded cutting as if to spare
The Victorian sensibilities of the town.
Though London-born, my life was anchored here
For fifteen years. A fabled place, yet boasting
Few of the Great. Victoria held it dear,
Thackeray did some growing-up, Pepys coached in,
Tennyson hurried out. This roll provides
Most of the famous. Maybe one day my friend
Keith Douglas, born here, will make the Guides.
Poets are legion. Time sorts us in the end.
But if not men, parks glorify this town.
Calverley, Nevill, Camden (rich images
Of lives we sigh for), a Common leading down
Into the busy streets by hilly stages,
True rus in urbe. And so much still complete,
So little spoiled, so little rearranged.
Pure nostalgia? Not quite. What’s oversweet
Is harking back to something wholly changed.
Here forms survive, though all my kin are dead:
Our house, the boundary stream, the one-track line,
The bridge so low I start to duck my head,
St John’s Wort in the hedge, and up the lane
That summer ground, so rhododendron-proud,
Where Woolley (they said), in one tremendous basting,
Lifted his longest six – over the crowd
Into a coal truck rumbling down to Hastings.
Yes, my Good Place. And though old-fashioned bores
May shake their heads and say the chap’s not trusted,
Dear Tunbridge Wells, I sign this poem Yours
Faithfully, Very Truly – and not Disgusted.
PREFACE
From two recent visits I came back quite reassured. I had expected something much worse. At least the outer shell of continuity appeared to remain intact, whatever lay underneath. The Pantiles looked tatty and rather forlorn; several of the shops under the arcade were empty. Jupps had gone, there was an Indian restaurant, the big toy-shop and Dust’s had disappeared. I even saw a violent drunk being led away, under the arcade, by two young policemen. I don’t know what my mother would have made of that. The big house on the corner of Grove Hill and Claremont Road, in which Miss Vian, the sister of the Admiral, had lived in my mother’s time, now proclaimed C N D messages from every groundfloor window and even from some upper-floor ones. The house next to it, once the home of Miss Meade-Waldo, one of my mother’s favourite Bridge partners, now demonstrated, from its windows, a violent hostility to blood sports. The Hickmott empire had now extended right up the left side of Grove Hill, almost to the level of the entrance to Calverley Park, engulfing on its way the big house in which Dr Wood had lived and practised. There was something suitable about that: the Hickmott brothers, the younger of whom had been at school with me, were undertakers, so they had been in the same area of skills as Dr Wood; the Hickmotts worked from the terminus, the doctor had worked further up the line. One of the little stone archers and his crocodile guarding the entrance to Camden Park had gone, but his little companion – now all on his own and without his bow and arrow – was still there. Nevill Park seemed as affluent as ever, the houses as big as ever, and none of them had been taken over by insurance companies. Poona Road was still unmade, and still deep in yellow mud. Mrs Phillips’ house overlooking the Happy Valley, in which the Basque children from Bilbao had been housed in 1938, and the German and Czech Jewish children, in 1939, had now become a hotel. The High Rocks looked frequented; but the little seat, facing the railway line, on which I had read about Carmen Silva, had been removed; and the footpath that had led from it through the woods under the overhanging rocks had been totally submerged in tall undergrowth. The Pulpit Tree was still in place, awaiting its preacher. A number of the smaller shops in the High Street had been replaced by estate agents, of which there appeared to be more than ever. There was a Spanish restaurant in Cumberland Walk. Lilac doors were beginning to appear down near Chapel Place. There were more antique-dealers than ever behind the Pantiles, an area now largely taken over by Pennink’s, a family well known to my mother from the Bridge table. As with Hickmott’s, I was glad of the evidence of a familiar name doing well.
The town looked somehow smaller, even Upper Grosvenor Road now seemed relatively close; but I found the Common more extensive than I remembered it, and the walk to the High Rocks and back by the Happy Valley quite tiring. A child’s scale of measurement and awareness of orientation can also be revealed subsequently as wildly inaccurate. If you grow up in a town and live in it for many years, you probably do not think of it in relation to the points of the compass. As Grove Hill, Mount Sion and Little Mount Sion were steep arid went uphill, when I went up them, if I gave the matter a thought at all, I supposed I was going north, for north would seem to spell out extra effort, while going downhill, because it was easier, would suggest going south. Once at the age of twelve I had acquired a bicycle, I could situate Tunbridge Wells in relationship to the surrounding countryside, but I could never be certain whether I was getting the town itself the right way up. I might even mentally have got it upside-down. For over forty years, I had felt that going up Grove Hill was going north, I could feel it was going north. In fact, I had got Tunbridge Wells askew, as if it had toppled over on its side. It was only on my most recent visit, while comparing my memory and the mental picture I had retained of a town that I believed I knew inside-out, with the sober, unblinking realities of an Ordnance map of the Maidstone District (it should have been headed the Tunbridge Wells District), that I discovered, to my surprise and chagrin, that Grove Hill ran uphill in an easterly direction. It was almost as if I had been suddenly betrayed by an old and trusted friend, all at once revealed as having kept back from me for years a rather disreputable secret. But, even with the benefit of a knowledge come by so late, after so many years of error, I still have difficulty in putting the town back on its proper base. I still think of Grove Hill as climbing north. Perhaps it does not matter. But it seemed necessary to readjust all the orientations in the text that relate to the various approaches to the town, even if this seemed a breach of faith with my childhood. Tunbridge Wells is back the right way up.
No doubt memory often plays tricks of this kind. I was never a scout and never had any reason to learn to use a compass. It was enough to know that the morning sun came into my mother’s dining-room and that the evening sun came in through the french windows of her drawing-room. I suspect that childhood memory often plays similar tricks. For myself, Frinton, where I was born, presented no problem; it was on the East Coast, the sea was to the east, Fourth Avenue could only extend inland, westwards. I found Le Havre and Aberystwyth similarly easy to come to terms with. But throu
What all this no doubt amounts to is that children, as well as long-term residents, do not give much attention to the points of the compass. I doubt whether Geoff Limbury-Buse could have charted his daily walk to and from the Tunbridge Wells and Counties Club. Why should he have done? He knew how to get there, and how to get back home. Before making the necessary readjustments to the compass, I found, in re-reading my text, that I even suggested, in the section entitled ‘Figures in a Landscape’, that, in his mind, he may have got Tunbridge Wells the wrong way up, or at least askew. I had not realised at that stage, that I had got Colchester the wrong way up, and Tunbridge Wells tilted on its side. There must have been town-plans in both places, but a child, or, indeed, any resident, would not think of looking at them. He would carry the town-plan in his head. As far as I am concerned, Grove Hill still climbs up north, guarded at its northern extremity by the surviving little stone archer. Childhood memory is more important, even if it gets things out of focus, than the unthinking, unimaginative accuracy of a compass or a map. I wrote this book with Tunbridge Wells tilting over at ninety degrees from north to east. As far as I am concerned, it will go on tilting over.
The town appeared to be largely unchanged but, of course, nearly everyone my mother and I had known had long been dead. Walking through the familiar streets, even though they no longer went in a familiar direction, and seeing the familiar houses, most of them unchanged, including the lovely Walmer Cottage at the foot of Mount Sion, was like walking through a place, the inhabitants of which had been struck down: here was the house in which my aunt Emily had died, here even was the big balconied window of the room in which she had died. I could have filled so many of the houses, big and small, with their dead inhabitants, and I knew nothing of their living ones. I even wondered if there were any people – perhaps one or two of my contemporaries at Rose Hill – Pearmund, later a dentist, Hickmott, if he could take his mind off the dead and remember the living – in the town whom I would know or who would know me. So I was very glad to see the lady at the counter in the book section of Goulden & Curry, upstairs, standing in exactly the same spot as she had occupied throughout my childhood; Miss Woodhams is her name. She has worked in the shop for fifty-nine years. I was not, after all, a complete stranger, not a poor Joseph, back in his village, and shunned by all, as in l’Histoire du Soldat. What is more, she even recognised me.
This is a book about growing up in a predominantly middle-class community in the south-east in the twenties and thirties. I have set out to rediscover the security and the continuity of a society based on elaborate, if unstated, hierarchies of class relations of considerable subtlety. It is a study of a world of grown-ups as observed and partly understood by a child between the ages of 4 and 13, and of an increasing awareness of people and places during the years of adolescence and youth. It concerns my relations with my parents, with a retinue of aunts and uncles on my mother’s side, and with her extensive circle of middle-class friends; but I have made room, too, for my own small group of local eccentrics. I am attempting to illustrate a society both immensely self- confident and largely immune from class conflict and social tensions, and so one in which a rather frightened child could feel immensely secure. And this sense of security would be derived as much from place as from people, so I have set about rediscovering the many fixed itineraries followed not only by myself as a child, but also those of others encountered in the course of these movements within the town and well beyond its limits. Which people, where, and when: so, a chronicle also of habit and routine, shopping and leisure: an attempt to place moving figures in a habitual landscape. Politics seem always to hover at several removes away in a society which seemed largely apolitical and from which the outside world was for a long time successfully excluded. Every person in his or her place, every object in its place, the whole town breathing regularly to a predictable time-table, everything as it should be, a place that was safe and cherished and remembered as such, but also a place of wonder and constant discovery.
As on a previous occasion, when I wrote about my grandparents, my uncle and my cousin Daisy, in my essay ‘The House in the Hythe’, included in Places, edited by Ronald Blythe, and published in 1981, my grateful thanks go to my sister, Mrs L.F. Papé, who has been infinitely patient in answering my queries and in rummaging in the enormous storehouse of her memories of Tunbridge Wells in the twenties, from a height seven years taller than my own, and thus commanding a much wider terrain. I am grateful to Mr and Mrs James B. Mennell Jr for having brought back to my vivid recollection the doleful figure of the Black Widow, as she haunted the macadam paths of the Common and for having supplied me with information about the Blue Mantles Cricket Club and for having recalled my mother’s imperturbability during an Alert, engaged in planting seeds in her small front-garden. Mrs Mennell has also put me right on a number of points concerning the schools for girls in the town. I owe to my friend – and former pupil – Dr C.A. Bayly, Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and at one time an inhabitant of Vale Royal (behind Mount Ephraim), his recollections of Skinners’ School and of the tough country boys who walked there every day from villages as far distant as six or ten miles; he has also enriched me with his minute knowledge of the geology of the Common and of the fossils to be found near the Wellington Rocks. With Professor George Gillespie, Professor of German at University College, Cardiff, I share both a Salopian experience – we were in the same awful House and suffered under the same awful Housemaster – and residence in the Royal Borough. Through him, I discovered, for the first time, the populous areas of the town behind the Old Town Hall, an area in which the pubs are particularly numerous and those who frequent them are particularly friendly. Through Professor Gillespie I was able to meet a number of his colleagues, at one time, like himself, teachers at Skinners’. He also added a new dimension to the existence of the Baltic Sawmills, in the person of his beautiful Latvian wife, Marika. My friend and former pupil, Lord Michael Pratt, has offered me glimpses of the Tunbridge Wells neighbourhood from an angle totally unfamiliar to me, adding his own memorable physical presence and his unforgettable voice to my awareness of the mute presence of his family in so many of the streets and Parks of the town: Camden Park, as it were, fait personne. Mr Paul Beale, now of Loughborough, and a member of a long-established family that has contributed in the past to much of the building of the residential areas of Tunbridge Wells, has been tireless in providing me with details from his own recollections – he followed me both to Miss Lake’s and to Rose Hill – and those of his father, still a resident. He has also contributed to my knowledge of Goods Station Road. I had the good fortune of meeting Mrs Keith Douglas, the mother of the poet (a fellow Mertonian), at the party given in the Bodleian for the launching of the biography of her son, and she too was generous with her recollections as a long-term resident of one of the quiet roads behind the Pantiles.
I would like to take this opportunity of thanking most warmly Hugo Brunner, in his double capacity as editor and publisher. In the former, he has been ever-helpful with his suggestions and his encouragement; in the latter, he has brought to the necessarily close relations between author and publisher the extra quality of friendship. I have been most fortunate in both my editor and my publisher and each has been infinitely patient in guiding an often untidy typescript towards publication.
