Tono Bungay

Matriculation kept me for four full days and then came an afternoon to spare, and I sought out Tottenham Court Road through a perplexing network of various and crowded streets.  But this London was vast! it was endless! it seemed the whole world had changed into packed frontages and hoardings and street spaces.  I got there at last and made inquiries, and I found my uncle behind the counter of the pharmacy he managed, an establishment that did not impress me as doing a particularly high-class trade.  “Lord!” he said at the sight of me, “I was wanting something to happen!”

He greeted me warmly.  I had grown taller, and he, I thought, had grown shorter and smaller and rounder but otherwise he was unchanged.  He struck me as being rather shabby, and the silk hat he produced and put on, when, after mysterious negotiations in the back premises he achieved his freedom to accompany me, was past its first youth; but he was as buoyant and confident as ever.

“Come to ask me about all that,” he cried.  “I’ve never written yet.”

“Oh, among other things,” said I, with a sudden regrettable politeness, and waived the topic of his trusteeship to ask after my aunt Susan.

“We’ll have her out of it,” he said suddenly; “we’ll go somewhere.  We don’t get you in London every day.”

“It’s my first visit,” I said, “I’ve never seen London before”; and that made him ask me what I thought of it, and the rest of the talk was London, London, to the exclusion of all smaller topics.  He took me up the Hampstead Road almost to the Cobden statue, plunged into some back streets to the left, and came at last to a blistered front door that responded to his latch-key, one of a long series of blistered front doors with fanlights and apartment cards above.  We found ourselves in a drab-coloured passage that was not only narrow and dirty but desolatingly empty, and then he opened a door and revealed my aunt sitting at the window with a little sewing-machine on a bamboo occasional table before her, and “work”—­a plum-coloured walking dress I judged at its most analytical stage—­scattered over the rest of the apartment.

At the first glance I judged my aunt was plumper than she had been, but her complexion was just as fresh and her China blue eye as bright as in the old days.

“London,” she said, didn’t “get blacks” on her.

She still “cheeked” my uncle, I was pleased to find.  “What are you old Poking in for at this time—­Gubbitt?,” she said when he appeared, and she still looked with a practised eye for the facetious side of things.  When she saw me behind him, she gave a little cry and stood up radiant.  Then she became grave.

I was surprised at my own emotion in seeing her.  She held me at arm’s length for a moment, a hand on each shoulder, and looked at me with a sort of glad scrutiny.  She seemed to hesitate, and then pecked little kiss off my cheek.

“You’re a man, George,” she said, as she released me, and continued to look at me for a while.

Their menage was one of a very common type in London.  They occupied what is called the dining-room floor of a small house, and they had the use of a little inconvenient kitchen in the basement that had once been scullery.  The two rooms, bedroom behind and living room in front, were separated by folding-doors that were never now thrown back, and indeed, in the presence of a visitor, not used at all.  There was of course no bathroom or anything of that sort available, and there was no water supply except to the kitchen below.  My aunt did all the domestic work, though she could have afforded to pay for help if the build of the place had not rendered that inconvenient to the pitch of impossibility.  There was no sort of help available except that of indoor servants, for whom she had no accommodation.  The furniture was their own; it was partly secondhand, but on the whole it seemed cheerful to my eye, and my aunt’s bias for cheap, gay-figured muslin had found ample score.  In many ways I should think it must have been an extremely inconvenient and cramped sort of home, but at the time I took it, as I was taking everything, as being there and in the nature of things.  I did not see the oddness of solvent decent people living in a habitation so clearly neither designed nor adapted for their needs, so wasteful of labour and so devoid of beauty as this was, and it is only now as I describe this that I find myself thinking of the essential absurdity of an intelligent community living in such makeshift homes.  It strikes me now as the next thing to wearing second-hand clothes.

You see it was a natural growth, part of that system to which Bladesover, I hold, is the key.  There are wide regions of London, miles of streets of houses, that appear to have been originally designed for prosperous-middle-class homes of the early Victorian type.  There must have been a perfect fury of such building in the thirties, forties, and fifties.  Street after street must have been rushed into being, Campden Town way, Pentonville way, Brompton way, West Kensington way in the Victoria region and all over the minor suburbs of the south side.

I am doubtful if many of these houses had any long use as the residences of single families if from the very first almost their tenants did not makeshift and take lodgers and sublet.  They were built with basements, in which their servants worked and lived—­servants of a more submissive and troglodytic generation who did not mind stairs.  The dining-room (with folding doors) was a little above the ground level, and in that the wholesome boiled and roast with damp boiled potatoes and then pie to follow, was consumed and the numerous family read and worked in the evening, and above was the drawing-room (also with folding doors), where the infrequent callers were received.  That was the vision at which those industrious builders aimed.  Even while these houses were being run up, the threads upon the loom of fate were shaping to abolish altogether the type of household that would have fitted them.  Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately prosperous middle-class families out of London, education and factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough, hardworking, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these places, new classes of hard-up middle-class people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were provided.  None of these classes have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our minds.  It was nobody’s concern to see them housed under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and demand had free play.  They had to squeeze in.  The landlords came out financially intact from their blundering enterprise.  More and more these houses fell into the hands of married artisans, or struggling widows or old servants with savings, who became responsible for the quarterly rent and tried to sweat a living by sub-letting furnished or unfurnished apartments.

I remember now that a poor grey-haired old woman who had an air of having been roused from a nap in the dust bin, came out into the area and looked up at us as we three went out from the front door to “see London” under my uncle’s direction.  She was the sub-letting occupier; she squeezed out a precarious living by taking the house whole and sub-letting it in detail and she made her food and got the shelter of an attic above and a basement below by the transaction.  And if she didn’t chance to “let” steadily, out she went to pauperdom and some other poor, sordid old adventurer tried in her place….

It is a foolish community that can house whole classes, useful and helpful, honest and loyal classes, in such squalidly unsuitable dwellings.  It is by no means the social economy it seems, to use up old women, savings and inexperience in order to meet the landlord’s demands.  But any one who doubts this thing is going on right up to to-day need only spend an afternoon in hunting for lodgings in any of the regions of London I have named.

But where has my story got to?  My uncle, I say, decided I must be shown London, and out we three went as soon as my aunt had got her hat on, to catch all that was left of the day.