A Battersea Childhood

Richard Church is remembered, if at all, as a late-flowering Georgian poet and a busy man of letters who contributed reviews to such long-forgotten periodicals as John O’London’s Weekly, and who in due course became Dylan Thomas’s baffled and increasingly embattled editor at J. M. Dent. But he deserves to be better known, if only for one book. Published by Heinemann in 1955, Over the Bridge is the first volume in an autobiographical trilogy (the other volumes of which were The Golden Sovereign and The Voyage Home); it takes him up to the age of 16, when he abandoned dreams of art school in favour of a career in the Civil Service, and it’s a small masterpiece of autobiography.

Church grew up in the old town of Battersea, between Battersea Bridge and the eighteenth-century church on the river: it lay ‘over the bridge’ from fashionable Chelsea, and the book opens on New Year’s Day 1900 with the 7-year-old Richard Church and his older brother gingerly carrying a fish-tank from an awe-inspiring artist’s house in Tite Street to their house on the other side of the river, dodging a gang of urchins on the way. A low-lying area of mudflats and damp and sulphurous fogs, Battersea was ‘a slumbrous suburb, largely peopled with artisan folk, clerks and minor Civil Servants such as my father’ and an itinerant cast of muffin-men, lamp-lighters and pigeon-fanciers. It was a Wellsian, lower middle-class world, yet many of its inhabitants had surprisingly grand or distinguished relations: Church’s mother, a Midlands girl, was related to George Eliot; an elderly glazier turned out to be the brother of J. A. Froude, the eminent Victorian historian, while a military-looking commissionaire was the brother of General Hector Macdonald, a hero of the Boer War. Unencumbered by important connections, Church’s father occupied a humble position in the Post Office. Years before, boldly venturing over the river to Chelsea, he and a gang of boys couldn’t resist pelting an irascible-looking Thomas Carlyle with pickled eggs in Cheyne Row – this was, Church observed, ‘my father’s only  contact with the world of letters during his formative years’ ‒ and despite his bristling black moustache he remained a perpetual boy: his son remembered him as ‘a creature released, like a colt from a stable’, who ‘galloped about the paddock of life with a thunder of hoofs and a flashing of nostrils’. Like many late Victorians and Edwardians, he was a passionate bicyclist, a ‘knight of the wheel’ who took to the open road at the slightest provocation, his lower half clad in spats and knickerbockers, and in due course he bought a couple of tandems so that his wife and two sons could join him in tours of the Home Counties. He played the violin and the flute, specializing in homely and frequently repeated melodies, while his wife accompanied him on an elderly upright piano. But for all Mr Church’s energy and enthusiasm, his wife was – for their younger son at least – the epicentre of the family. An elementary schoolteacher by profession, she was passionate about her husband and her sons but suffered from ill-health and melancholia: Church, who was devoted to her, recalls her ‘rich personality, her fearless ambitions, and her quick, intuitive intelligence’, and ‘the warm brown of her hair and eyes, the firm mouth, the blood-mantled cheeks, and the undecided conflict between joy and melancholy that affected every movement of her over-expressive features’. But the most forceful member of the family was Richard’s older brother, Jack. An austere, domineering, rather monk-like figure, with a great beak of a nose and eyes which ‘smouldered back in their caverns like panthers at bay’, Jack seemed far cleverer and more talented than his nervous and late-developing younger brother: he was a brilliant pianist, scorning his father’s middlebrow melodies in favour of Beethoven sonatas, and insisting that the family piano be replaced with something more suited to his gifts, and a competent artist. Poor Richard was, by contrast, an unimpressive specimen. Super-sensitive and, one suspects, highly neurotic, he suffered from stomach cramps and was more allergic than most to noise. ‘I was an apprehensive boy, groping my way through the world as a snail does, by the aid of instinctive horns that retracted with lightning speed before the least opposition,’ he tells us, and ‘what I lacked in intellectual fibre I made up in nervous sensibility. I thought through my skin, as a cat does.’ Like many children, he believed he could fly if he really bent his mind to it, and retained his faith longer than most. He was also extremely short-sighted – so much so that he enjoyed an almost mystical moment of revelation when an optician in Clapham fitted him out with a pair of specs. He immediately taught himself to tell the time, and before long he had learned to read. The Churches were not a bookish family, but Richard was a natural bookworm. He worked his way through Masterman Ready at the age of 7, before moving on to the Book of Job. ‘Only in reading did I find serenity and self-confidence,’ he writes. ‘As soon as I put my book down and took off the armour of words, I felt the winds of life blow cold upon my nakedness and I shivered with apprehension.’ But reading could prove a fraught affair: he read Villette ‘with an intensity of emotion that made the sweat stand in beads on my forehead and run down over my spectacles, so that I had to take them off and wipe them, while dipping my head closer into the book to continue reading with the naked eye’. Finding his way into print for the first time with a short story in the school magazine ‒ ‘Fine, my son. Stick to it!’ his father told him, before pedalling off into the distance – made him ‘vain and self-conscious (a weakness that I was later to find to be an occupational disease in the literary profession)’. Richard was 11 when it was decided that his mother’s health could stand the damp of Battersea no longer, and the family moved east to Herne Hill. Richard still ‘hovered over life with as much certainty as a dragonfly over a brook on a hot day’, but he was sent to a school in Dulwich where the headmaster recognized and encouraged his artistic gifts. A precocious reader, he immersed himself in Ruskin and worked his way through George Eliot’s Romola; but above all he wanted to be a painter. He was offered a place at Camberwell Art School, but his father insisted that he should instead study for the Civil Service exams. He went to work in the Land Registry offices in Lincoln’s Inn. Brother Jack became, in due course, a schoolmaster; and Over the Bridge ends with young Richard keeping himself awake at night to read the books he might have read had he gone on to art school or university. He was also writing poems, some of which found their way into print. In 1933 he abandoned the Civil Service for the literary life, and joined J. M. Dent as their poetry editor. Two years later, the young Dylan Thomas submitted a collection of poems to the firm. Church had no time for the work of T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he regarded ‘surrealism in poetry with abhorrence’, telling Thomas that he was ‘distressed to see its pernicious effect in your work because I believe you to be outstanding amongst your generation’. He finally agreed to publish Twenty-five Poems although ‘I cannot understand the meaning of the poems, but in this matter I have decided to put myself aside and let you and the public face each other.’ Thomas, for his part, came to regard his publisher as ‘a cliché-riddled hack’, and lethally ridiculed his ‘pale, gentle, professional charmer’s smile, placing together the tips of his thumb and index finger, as if to express some precise subtlety’. Had he lived to read Over the Bridge he might have thought more kindly of his editor and fellow-poet.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Jeremy Lewis 2016