Category: stories

My second term at Normandale, at Bexhill-on-Sea, proved to be my last there. I had been sent there as a boarder, at the age of six, shortly after my mother had married David Stiven; and I was blissfully happy, being by far the youngest boy in the school and, consequently, much fussed over. But when the summer term ended I found myself spending a dreary, lonely August holiday confined to a rather gloomy London hotel in the Cromwell Road….

In the Long Ago, when people lighted the dark winter nights with tallow candles, a candle shop stood by the side of a brook. There was a great set kettle for trying out, a heavy iron press and leaden moulds. Altogether, it was a pretty greasy place, with piles of fresh tallow leaves, great “cheeses” of scraps, barrels of prepared tallow, and boxes of candles ready for market, and the fall and winter birds evidently thought it a feast provided by the gods for their delectation.

The presiding genius of the shop — David, the Candlemaker — was an uncouth man, but he had a big heart and a warm love for the sweet things of nature, especially birds, and they seemed to know it. How they took possession and over-ran the place!…

Born in 1688, Emanuel Swedenborg began his career by mastering all the sciences of his day. Still judged by many to have possessed more factual information than any other person in history, he wrote 150 scientific works in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, optics and so forth. These contained many original discoveries: he described the function of the ductless glands and the cerebellum; he originated the nebular hypothesis of the solar system; he suggested the particle structure of magnets….

Dear Godwin, —

The punch, after the wine, made me tipsy last night. This I mention, not that my head aches, or that I felt, after I quitted you, any unpleasantness or titubancy; but because tipsiness has, and has always, one unpleasant effect — that of making me talk very extravagantly; and as, when sober, I talk extravagantly enough for any common tipsiness, it becomes a matter of nicety in discrimination to know when I am or am not affected….

We soon came to the house we were looking for, by far the most impressive structure in the whole village. From the outside it looked decidedly gloomy with its blackened walls, narrow barred windows, and all the marks of long neglect. It had been the home of a titled family which had gone away long ago; then it had served as a barracks for the carabinieri until they had moved to their newly-built modern headquarters, and the filth and squalor of the walls inside still bore witness to its military occupation.

Harry Parr-Davies was an accompanist for Gracie Fields and writer of some of her most famous songs, among them the World War II classic ‘Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye’. Alas, on a 1939 Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary with Fields, Parr-Davies appeared to run clean out of luck, possibly while waving someone goodbye, when his glasses fell overboard. He was too short-sighted to read music without them, and in some embarrassment went to report his mishap to Fields.

…And the stories about my father grew steadily worse. Some were altogether incredible, yet were continually being repeated. One of them was so bad I was nearly distracted about it. Mr. and Mrs. John Connett, true friends of my father in Pittsfield, came round to his office one day and repeated it to him sympathetically and with the assurance that they and their friends were going to do the best they could to “nail that lie.” With such a story circulating — i.e., that Father was going demented and, under the delusion that insects were crawling around in everybody’s wounds or inwards, was poisoning and killing his patients wholesale in the endeavor to poison and kill out the cockroaches, tumble-bugs, etc., was it any wonder that my father’s practice suffered?

Sarah’s malady was still a mystery, yet that October she was discharged from the asylum and listed as “Recovered.” Clara rented a furnished room for them, and when Johnny Bennett visited her there, she told him that her mother had been on location with her in New Bedford. No mention of an asylum was made.

In an American paper I find this anecdote: “An old lady was being shown the spot on which a hero fell. ‘I don’t wonder,’ she replied. ‘It’s so slippery I nearly fell there myself.'”

Now that story, which is very old in England, and is familiar here to most adult persons, is usually told of Nelson and the Victory. Indeed it is such a commonplace with facetious visitors to that vessel that the wiser of the guides are at pains to get in with it first. But in America it may be fresh and beginning a new lease of life; it will probably go on forever in all English-speaking countries, on each occasion of its recrudescence finding a few people to whom it is new….

She had no sooner disembarked at Aspinwall [Panama] [in 1864] than she set out to find the cemetery where she imagined George Marshall was buried. Without worrying about her trunks, which had been piled on top of each other at random, without haggling over a high-priced room, Fanny set off down the main street, threading her way, her daughter in tow, between the slums and brothels, the billiard parlors and gambling dens. Then she crossed the iron track along the seafront and the sheds where rows of bananas, coconuts, heaps of coral, and vegetable ivory awaited shipment to New York, baking under roofs of corrugated metal.

I worked for my brother from August 1899, to March, 1901, at $16 a month, making $304, of which I spent only $12 in that time, as I had clothes. On the first day of March I went to a farm that I had bought for $150, paying $50 down. It was a bush farm, ten miles from my brother’s place and seven miles from the nearest crossroads store. A man had owned it and cleared two acres, and then fallen sick and the storekeeper got it for a debt and sold it to me. My brother heard of it and advised me to buy it….

“I remember I started one of these poems in Marvell’s four-foot couplet and showed it to my wife. And she said “Why not say what really happened?” (It wasn’t the one about her.) The metre just seemed to prevent any honesty on the subject, it got into the cadence of the four-foot couplet.”

“I had never published the following Account of my Life, had it not been at the Desire of several of my particular Friends. As they had heard (a considerable Time after I enter’d Trumpeter on board the Revenge Privateer) that I was kill’d, with several others, by the Spaniards, in attacking a Bark near the Canary Islands, my returning safe to England surpriz’d them very much, and made them curious to enquire into the Manner of my Deliverance.”

“When that letter came in London I was most awfully sorry and wished I had never seen the boy. I was perfectly miserable and from trying to imagine how he felt I almost felt I was a criminal.”

It was not until I was seven that I became embarrassed by my father’s lack of self-consciousness. He had just discovered the Bates ‘better sight without glasses’ book and method. One exercise involved rolling the eyeballs in order to strengthen the internal muscles of the eye. Another, called ‘palming’, required one to place one’s palms over both eyes and to imagine a starless night or black velvet. When my father chose to do these exercises, sitting beside me on a District Line train en route to Dorking via Wimbledon, I sat in silence, cheeks burning, convinced that our fellow passengers would think him crazy.

“Fields’ family made little more than a token search. His mother felt that, at eleven, he was young to set up on his own, but the problems of four other children diverted her mind. The attitude of Fields’ father could perhaps be summed up by the handy phrase ‘good riddance.'”

“The dreadful year of 1789 was upon us, and fear had already seized the minds of wise men and women. I remember the events of one evening in particular; I had invited some people to a concert in my house. Most of those who arrived were quite distraught; they had been to Longchamps that morning and the populace, gathered at the barrier of L’Etoile, had hurled abuse at all those who passed by in carriages; the wretched folk jumped onto the tailboards crying ‘Next year you will be travelling behind and we will be inside!’ as well as a thousand other insults of an even more vicious nature.”

“No sooner had I sat down to write to the Count, but a page from the Prince came to me, saying, that the Prince desired to speak with me: at this message my blood ran chill in every vein, as if I had been informed of some sudden accident….”

“When Molière fled from Paris, he became, in the phrase of the theatre, a “barn-stormer.” An ox- cart was his home, his play-house some vacant grange or tennis-court. Eventually he obtained a following in certain towns, and recognition as an official entertainer in at least two provinces ; yet for nearly thirteen years he was at best a vagabond, tramping the highroads of France beside his unwinged chariot.”

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. In the advertisements of the county paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich — overnight — by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers. It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures. We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly! — not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry….