At the age of seventeen

At the age of seventeen, three years later than her sisters, my mother  was sent as an apprentice to work in this large draper's shop. At Daniels mother was put into the millinery and there father saw her. He saw her fair hair. She looked - he told me - like a goddess in her mutton-chop sleeves and so desireble with her tiny waist. ('Eighteen inches', she would put in). She was so quick with the costumers, he said, so clever with trimmings! She could put an ugly hat on a grumbling woman, give a twist, snatch a feather or a bunch of cherries and so dazzle the customer with chatter and her smiles.
 As for my father, Mother was astonished by him.
 'He was so clean, dear. You never saw anything so clean.' The poorly paid assistant fed in the basement, slept in the attics and went out to get drunk when the shop closed.
'Eight to eight, weekdays, eleven o'clock Saturday nights'
Mother would say. 'Old Daniels was a beast'
They worked in the cold draughts  and the poisonous headaching smell of the gaslight.
'So clean' my mother would go on 'and so particular about his clothes - you know your father. Always the silk hat and the spats. He might have got some bad girl if he hadn't had me.'
 She was in awe of him; he kept his nails perfect and there was a pleasant smell of Pear's soap about him and his teeth were white. He cleaned them - as his mother did- with soot or salt.
 At this period my father - who was eventually to become very fat indeed, going up to eighteen stone in his time - was a slender young man. He looked grave, his fine brown eyes seemed to burn, and he could change from the effusive to the canny hard look of the brisk young Yorkshireman out for the 'brass' there was sometimes a hollow-eyed and haunted look on his face. The fact is what he told me my dumbstruck mother when they talked together - he had had a wretched childhood. My grandfather, so benevolent to me , had been a harsh, indeed a savage, father.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

It was easy to become a preacher in those days

It was easy to become a preacher in those days; gospel halls and missions were everywhere; the greater the number of sects, the greater the opportunities for argument, Soon he was at it in the evenings, after he had put down the hod. Yet to have got religion would not have been enough. I think that what impelled and gave him a rough distinction was his commanding manner and the knowledge that he had a fine voice. He was a good singer, he loved the precise utterance of words. He loved language. All we ever knew was that a pious spinster lady in Kirbymoorside, heard of him and was impressed by his militant looks,his strenght and his voice. She got him off the builder's ladder and arranged hor him to be sent to a theological college in Nottingham.
But the flesh - and ambition- were as strong as the spirit in grandfather. He was courting the tailor's daughter and perhaps as a commomn workman he would not have get her. So at nineteen or twenty, on his prospects, he married her and went off with her to Nottingham as a student, and in a year was a father. He had only a small grant to live on. He got odd jobs. He told me he learned his Latin , Greek and Hebrew travelling on the Nottingham trams. He saved pennies, for it was part of the arrangement that he should pay back the cost of his education at so much a year in five years. My father had unhappy memories of a hungry chilhood, and one of great severity. But once his training was over grandfather triumphed. At twenty-two - the family legend is - he 'filled the Free Trade Hall i Manchester' with his harsh, denouncing sermons.
 Why was it , then, that after his success he was to be found in Bradford and then - getting smaller and smaller - in the little towns of the moos and the fells? It may have been that all his energy had been spent in getting out the working class and becoming a middle-class man.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

My grandmother has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages

My grandmother  has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages. Her maiden name was Sawdon and she came from a place of that name near the moors inland from Whitby; it is a purely Scandinavian part of England - and she was the youngest, prettiest and most exacting of three daughters of a tailor in Kirbymoorside, in the godly Pickering valley near by. My fatherwas born there and spoke of seeing the old man sitting crosslegged and sewing on the table on the window of his shop. Grandma was vain of her clothes and her figure. She usually wore a dark blue-and-white spotted dress. She had pale blue eyes deeply insent, a babyish and avid look,  and the drooping little mouth of a spoiled child. Her passion for her husband and her two sons was absolute; she thought of nothing else and me she pampered. With outsiders she was permanent 'right vexed' or 'disgusted'
Her 'Willyum', my grandfather, was let out of her sight as little as possible. The minister had the hard northern vanity also, but differed from hers. He was a shortish, stout, hard-bellied, and muscular man with a strong frightening face, iron-grey hair and looked like a sergeant major who did not drink. He was a man of authority with a deep, sarcastic voice used to command. When I was a child I had the impression that e was God and the Ten Commandments bound together by his dog-collar. He was proud of his life story..
 Gradually I learned that he was the youngest son of a fishing family in Hull _ his father was a trawler seaman - and that all his brothers had been drowned between Hul and Dogger Bank. His mother had picked him up and taken him inland to Bradford , away from ships, and had brought him up there in great poverty. He had known what it was to 'clem'. He grew up and worked  on the roads for a time; the ran off and joined the army, (this would had been in the sixties) and since only the hungry or the riff raff did this, he must been in a poor way. he chose the artillery. This lead to an event of which he boasted.
One day when his battery was stationed outside some seaside place, I believe on the Mersey. They were at artillery target practice, firing out to sea, and the safety of passing vessels was regulated by a flag signal. It is quite in my grandfather's character that he fired his gun when the flag was up and contrary to orders and sent what he used to tell me was a 'cannon ball' through the mainsail of a passng pleasure yacht. The yacht, of course, belonged to a rich man who made a fuss and my grandfather was arrested and court-martialled. He was dismissed from the Army
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In these sudden crisis of our lives

In these sudden crisis of our lives when I went off with my father to Yorkshire, my mother sometimes took mu brother Cyril to her sister's at Ipswich ans left him there. When the two of us met again we would be astonished to see how long our legs had got and scarcely recognized each other's voices. Nine had the hard Yorkshire strain, he had the softer, politer voice of the south. Unlike myself ha was an affectionate boy and he observed more of the true situation in our home than I did. He was an easy victim and he early became a very bad stammerer. this vanished at our Aunt's house where he was the little gentleman, used to the drawing room, to servants and Edwardian niceties. When he came back to our rough and tumble, the sight of a table no properly laid and of rooms ill-furnished and knocked about by our life, made him nervous and upset. He taked in careful and elderly way at the time
 But now we were both leaving York for Ipswich in our own. The train ran through the empty landscape of the Fens lying under the wide skies that had moved the Norwich painters.We saw powerful Ely cathedral on its hill in that flat land and were in sweetly rolling East Anglia, the country of large village churches, monastic building and pretty white pargeted and timbered houses, some of the loveliest things in England. This region had once been rich when England's great wealth was in wool and before the water power and steam engine of the north had captured the trade a century before. Strange names like Eye and March excited me. I had read Hereward the Wake and knew of fanes and that 'silly Sufolk?meant holy Suffolk.
 I saw the reason for my brother's distinction when we got out at Ipswich station. We were met by a tall man of fifty who had a domed head like a large pink egg, fluffy white hair and a short white beard. He looked like a pious ram. Perhaps those mild blue eyes and red wet lips were rougish - as my mother often blurted out in cheery way -burt he had a slow considerate manner and the voice had the straying educated bleat.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable

Our journey to the Manse at Repton is miserable. Love in a little shop have been - and remained for life - my mother's ideal. Now, though a cheeky Cokney girl, she was wretched, frightened and ashamed. (' We never owed a penny; up the girls were brought up straight') Sha was a slight and tiny fair-haierd young woman with a sulky seductive look. In the train a salior pi
ulled oof ajack knife and tossed it about: she called the guard. The sailor said he was only doing it to stop the baby crying. The arrival at the Manse was awful. My grandmother was confirmed on her opinion- she had given it bluntly and within earshot, when my father had first taken my mother there, wearing her London clothes -that her favourite son had been trapped and ruined by a common shop-girl of whom she said:
'I lay she's nowt but a London harlot'
She said she'd take the baby.
'She tried to snatch you away from me, Vic dear, and said, she'd bring you up herself,' my mother often told me.
Mary Helen, my father's mother, was a great one for coveting a dress, a brooch, a ring, a bag even a baby from any woman.
As for choice of words - this bonnie little white-haired woman with a smile that glistered sweetly like the icing of one of her fancy cakes, fed her mind on love stories in the religious weeklies and the language of fornication, adultery, harlotry and concubinage taken from the Bible, sharpened by the blunt talk of the Yorkshire villages. Harlots was her general name for the women of her husband's congregations who bought new hats. The old lady assumed that my mother, like any other country girl, had come to leave me and would return next day to London to take up her profession again.
In the early years of my boyhood I spent long periods at the Manse. I have little memory of Repton,beyond the large stone pantry smelling of my grandmother's bread and the pans of milk; and of the grating over the cellarwhere my grand father used to growl up at me from the damp, saying in his enormous and enjoyable voice:
'I'm the grisly bear'
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'

On my birth certificate my father's trade is written 'Stationary (master)'. An ambitious young man, he had given up his job as a shop assistant in Kentish town and had opened a small newsagents and stationery in the Rushmere district of Ipswich. He did not know the city and had gone there because he thought he had a superb 'opening'. He did not know the trade but he had found 'premises'- a word that was sacramental to him all his life. He spoke of 'premises' as others speak of the New Jerusalem. He had no capital. He was only twenty-two; the venture was modest, almost pastoral; but he had smelled the Edwardian boom ant it enlarged a flaw that had - I've been told- even then become noticeable  in this character. one of nature's salesmen, he was more one of nature's buyer. He looked at the measly little shop, stripped it and put in counters, cabinets and shelves('You know your father, dear'). The suspicious Suffolk folk hated this modern splash and saw he had spent so much on fittings that he had nothing left to stock. the bright little shop stood out as a warning to all in a crafty neighbourhood. Few customers came. The new painting smelled of sin to them. At the age of twenty-two my young father was affronted and flabbergasted to find after a few months that he was bankrupt, or if not legally bankrupt, penniless and pursued.
 There a picture of him a year or two before this time. he is thin, jaunty, with thick oily black hair, a waxed moustache and eyes caught between a harsh, brash stare and a twinkle. He would be quick to take apencil out and snap down your order. He wears a watch and chain. not for long: he will soon pawn them - as he had done before -and my mother's engagement ring too, escape from the premises, put her into those rooms over the toy shop. once I was born, the young Micawber pack us to his father's Manse in Yorkshire, while he goes indignantlyback to London to get a 'berth'. The fact that he has gonebust means nothing to him at all. He goes to the nearest Wesleyian Church - for he had already left the Congrecionalist - and sings his debts away in a few stentorian hymns. And so I, dressed in silk finery and wrapped in a white shawl, go screaming up to Yorkshire to meet my forbears.
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett

In our family, as far as are concerned

In our family, as far as are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth. Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forbears vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather vanish into the common grass. All we could get out of mother was that her grandfather had once taken a horse to Dublin; and sometimes in my father's expansive stories, his grandfather had owned trawlers in Hull, but when an abashed regard for fact, uncommon in my father, touched him in the eighties, he told us that his ancestor, a decayed seaman, was last seen gutting herrings at a bench in the fishmarket of that city. The only certainty is that I come from a set of storytellers and moralists and that neither party cared much for the precise. The story tellers were for ever changing the tale and the moralist tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light. On my mother's side they were all pagans, and she a rootless London pagan, a fog worshipper, brought up on the folk-lore of the North London streets; on my father's side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country men, who had been settled along the Yorkshire coasts or among its moors and fells for hundreds of years. There is enough in the differences between North and South to explain the battles and uncertainties of a lifetime. 'How I got into you lot, I don't know,' my mother used to say on and off all her life, looking at us with fear, as if my father and not herself has given birth yo us, She was there , she conveyed, because she had been captured. It made her unbelieving and sly.

A good many shots must have been fired during the courtship of my parents and many more when I was born in lodgings over a toy shop in the middle of Ipswich at the end of 1900. Why Ipswich? My parents had no connexion with the town. The moment could not have been worse. Queen Victoria was dying and my mother, young and cheerful though she was, identified herself, as the decent London poor do, with all the females of the Royal Family, especially with their pregnancies and funerals. She was a natural Victorian; the past with all its sadness meant more to her than the hopes of the new century.

Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett