Strolling with Dickens

When I was a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s I believed that my father was a close personal friend of Charles Dickens. They must, I thought, have met at various inns in London and shared jokes and stories and enormous slap-up breakfasts with baked meats and ale. Samuel Pickwick would often be there, too, and Dickens would address my father as ‘VSP’, as all his friends did. We lived in the country for much of that time, in a house which I imagined was just like Dickens’s Dingley Dell. There was a walled garden, with a little summer-house, and I half expected the Fat Boy to pop up from behind the rhubarb and make my flesh creep.

I suppose I believed this because my father used to read a lot of Dickens to my sister Josephine and me; I remember David Copperfield and, best of all, The Pickwick Papers. And he was so good at it; he did a brilliant Mr Jingle and an excellent Sam Weller. It was the sheer vitality of his reading that captivated me, just as, later in life, I came to marvel at the energy of his own writing. We moved back to London in 1956 when I was 16, and I began to see how much Charles Dickens and VSP had in common. They both knew London well and wrote about Londoners. And they had a particular part of south London in common – Southwark and Bermondsey. This was the site of the Marshalsea prison where Dickens’s father was locked up for debt, and this was also the centre of the leather trade where my father went to work as an office boy when he was 15. My father and I walked everywhere in London; often from Camden Town across Regent’s Park, with its frenzied, shouting football matches and its boating lake. It was while we were gazing at that lake that he first told me a particular story of his childhood in south London. After one of the frequent family rows his mother would say: ‘I’m going to the park to drown myself in the lake. Come on, Vic, get your coat.’ At first he’d trail anxiously behind her, but eventually he learned to call her bluff. ‘Here’s a good bit, Mum,’ he’d say. ‘Nice and deep. Why not jump in here?’ Then she would drag him crossly home. And we would walk in Bermondsey and look for the places VSP had known in the leather trade. He always said this was where he got his education, being sent on errands in those alarming seeping tunnels round London Bridge and the narrow cobbled alleys behind the towering Thames wharves. This felt like Artful Dodger territory; now the Dodger has grown up and works in one of those great financial institutions in the neighbourhood. I think I also got my education walking with my father. He showed me the building in Weston Street where he started and I pictured the clerks with their ledgers at their tall desks. One of them must have been Bob Cratchit. It had been a rough area. He described bedraggled drunken local women throwing horse dung at the windows of the office, the racket in the streets of all the horse-drawn wagons, and the frightening darkness at night without street lighting. Many readers of A Cab at the Door have pointed out the similarity between VSP’s father and that treasured Dickensian figure, Mr Micawber. The cab was always at the door to take the family away from another set of creditors. These flits were mostly around Dulwich and Camberwell, but there was also family history in north London. We walked in Kentish Town, but we never found Daniels, the draper’s shop where his father first met his mother. My grandfather had run away from his tyrannical father in Yorkshire and now cut a fine figure as a shop-walker in Daniels; my grandmother worked in the millinery department, was a quick, darting cockney girl and a great storyteller. I remember them both. Just. Grandfather was big, polished, gleaming with self-approval, wearing a well-cut suit he couldn’t afford. Grandma, as I remember her, was frail and tiny, lying on a sofa, still telling mischievous stories. She told my sister and me about her days as a shop girl at Daniels, scampering across the busy streets, ducking under the horses’ heads and giving them a naughty slap on the way. She talked about her childhood when they had a hansom cab rank outside the house and their parrot imitated the cabmen’s voices, ordering them to move forward in the rank. On Sunday nights after dinner, when I was in my late teens, VSP and I would catch a No. 68 bus from Camden Town to Holborn to post his book review through the letterbox of the New Statesman whose offices were then in Great Turnstile. (On Sunday mornings, the main sound in our house would be the ferocious clatter of my mother’s Imperial typewriter, typing out that review, deciphering his impossible spidery handwriting, crossings-out and insertions.) After delivering the review we usually walked home and he would talk about books, or he might reminisce about being on fire watch at the New Statesman in the war, standing on the roof with buckets of sand, and the editor Kingsley Martin and Richard Crossman, who was later to be an important figure in Harold Wilson’s Government. On the roof one night Crossman said: ‘Tell me, VSP, do you think our office cleaning woman’s skirts are gradually getting shorter?’ ‘No,’ my father replied. ‘I think you are just becoming fonder of her.’ He might also talk about the bombing raid in Holborn and describe the scene of broken glass and shattered tree branches, and this might remind him of the Zeppelin raid one night in the First World War when he was a boy living in Dulwich and his father was away. He and his two younger brothers were excited, but his mother called them all downstairs and stood rocking and moaning, clutching her sons and her daughter, listening to the anti-aircraft fire, while the boys longed to go back upstairs and watch the spectacle through the bedroom window. That was the beginning of his first important literary success. At Alleyn’s school the boys in his class were ordered to write an account of the raid. And my father, by chance, chose the device of writing from the point of view of a desperate and anxious mother. The piece was read out to the school assembly and he was briefly a hero. That showed the importance of being someone else when you write, he taught me. There were often visits to pubs on our walks. We preferred the shabby down-at-heel ones where we could watch other people and listen. Many of his short stories were based on a snatch of overheard conversation, even just a single phrase. The titles often suggest a fragment of talk in a pub or a shop – ‘You Make Your Own Life’, ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does’, ‘It May Never Happen’. In ‘Things as They Are’, one of my favourites, we listen to two genteel lower middle-class ladies getting sedately sloshed in a bar. After a family holiday in Ireland, when I was younger, we were driving back from Fishguard and stopped at a hotel to rest for an hour in the lounge, after the overnight ferry. VSP came back from the bar looking pleased. He had just overheard a man say that he was planning to climb halfway up Snowdon. At the time I couldn’t understand why this so delighted my father, but, many years later, I found this small incident smuggled into his story ‘The Snag’. Nowadays I love to walk alone in London, thinking of my father, listening for the sort of overheard remarks which he would have treasured, and looking at the tops of buildings for those architectural quirks and flourishes he always enjoyed. I miss his company. Now he’s somewhere else, strolling with Charles Dickens perhaps.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © Oliver Pritchett 2008