George Lyward: His Autobiography

Lyward

PREFACE

Towards the end of his life, my father assembled this autobiography. It was never published because the publishers felt that he had not adequately illuminated his transition from patient to healer. For whatever reasons, my father was unwilling to make the changes they required and the whole project was shelved. It may well be that they also felt that the book lacked commercial viability. I don’t know. Time has gone by and new publishing methods now allow a limited circulation of the book without thought to such viability.

George Lyward wrote very much as he spoke and those readers who knew him will hear his voice. His punctuation was necessarily complicated and I have, in places, attempted to simplify it. I have, however, resisted the temptation to edit in any way the manuscript which he offered to the publishers. The words are as he wrote them; I have not tried to alter any of his sometimes complex constructions.

Numerous people have enquired about this autobiography over the years. Here it is.

J.M.L., 2009

Chapter 1

Child, Pupil and Teacher (1894 – 1918)

Imagine a woman lying on a couch. The couch is one of those Victorian ones with a polished side and head-end. Its bolster and covering are green. The green is very present as I write. The woman is frail and worn. By her stockinged feet at the side of the couch stands a frail little boy and he is gently stroking her feet to ease the throbbing in them. Presently he will stroke her head. I was that little boy.

As this picture drifts into my mental vision I might be expected to feel revulsion, but I do not – I only feel the utter devotion which I felt all those years ago.

We lived in Aliwal Road, Clapham Junction. How I hated it! But I can never escape it; can never stop loving it. Sometimes I played in the street, but always fearfully. With what poignancy I recall a typical scene in which I was shouting ‘Let me go’. My torturers were six other small boys, all round about eight years of age. Any single one of them would have passed for a friendly creature, and at least two would rather not have joined in. There must have been a look on my face which appealed to them to help its owner to strengthen his frail grip on life rather than to drive him to release it still more. But the word had been spoken by their leader, and that was enough Who were they to betray their leader for a pair of appealing eyes?

It was a sight to sicken the heart. You must watch children at play together if you want to understand the truth that it is a hard world. There are plenty of proofs of this fact vouchsafed to men and women, but all is commentary when compared to the completeness of the child’s sense of it, should he fall foul of his fellows at play, and there is seldom a group of children which does not contain one who is not sure of himself, not sure of others, not sure of anything. Hell is an early experience for him. We forget our childhood days. We know that there are fears and stings, and we know that there are, for some, great abandonments and priceless freedoms. But we must watch children at play to realize the world of difference there is at the core of people’s lives. No two men face to face will make us feel even an echo of the trembling set up by the difference of their heart notes. The masks must be machine-made when the grown-ups buy them.

There are seven children, and one of them is a victim. You will call him weakling, and do you know what you are saying? One blow of his fist would have scattered them, or if it had roused them, it would have been to hit again and again and release the pent up fury, which at present was manifest but as shrinking fear. He would have made two firm friends at least and have gone on his way rejoicing, bruised perhaps, beaten perhaps, but different – what would it have mattered, though he took home a black eye or a swollen nose?

He was too fragile? More fragile than the others? Yes, but how much more? The real weakness was neither in the frailer arm nor in the less robust leg. They were not good, but they were good enough. Besides, if he had not looked as though he expected to be hit, he would never have invited the agony he was now going through. And it was agony, a double agony of fear and shame. For one minute he had tried to put on a brave face. But he had soon collapsed into the hopeless wail which was the chief delight of his tormentors.

What devils boys can be! And how often has that been said. They had seen him nearing the corner of the street and had surrounded him, elbowing, shoving, plucking. He grasped his shilling, and his thoughts flew back to his mother, who playfully, with ‘Off you go’ had pushed him out on his errand. This was one of his great joys, to go buying things for her, his dear, dear mother. Then his heart beat high. To run and carry for her, that was his golden privilege. And if only he could have fought his way through the gang and have brought her things through the sweat and anger of battle, that would have made his shopping a grand adventure. Always this same dream and so today he had come out, and at the corner he was surrounded by the gang. Oh! The helplessness of it. And she was waiting. God, it wasn’t fair. Why had God made him such a worm? For he was often thinking about God. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.

Mrs. Thornicroft, who knew his mother, lived near the corner of this street, and as he escaped from the ring of now satisfied urchins, she came out of her doorway with arms upraised. ‘Off with you, off with you. What do you think you mean by bullying like that, six of you up against one, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves?’

‘He, he, he!’ That was more than they had dared to hope for. To have Mrs. Anybody waving a threatening arm was indeed a luscious climax. ‘He, he.’ They ran just far enough to be safe, for they were only eight years old themselves, and she was grown up, albeit only old mother so-and-so. Then she slammed the door upon herself, convinced that she did not know what the world was coming to, as presumably all the previous Mrs. Thornicroft had known. And Michael Rendle went back along the street the way he had come and found his way to the shop by a longer route, his eyes wider than before, ears alert for this enemy or that, and his heart sore because he was so great a failure.

I wrote this in 1926 or thereabouts and it conveys something of how I stumbled about in those days.

I was made for gaiety. I know nobody in whom it wells up more quickly than it does in me. How it has survived this other thing is for me a marvel. I say this other thing because it is almost tangible. But enough of that.

Talk about Aliwal Road I must; it will not yet be relegated to the past. Where was it? Clapham Junction. We lived at the top end of the third road on the right hand side of St. John’s Road, which started opposite the station. From our window in the flat upstairs we could see St. Mark’s church garth which ended in a railinged triangle in Battersea Rise. Lilac trees grew there, and for years I could not see lilac without a lump in my throat. Stockinged feet, lilac, and a little boy who hated his frail body which had nearly failed him altogether some years earlier through what was then called wasting sickness. Did they really bring lilies to me on my last day but one? I could never abide lilies because I was sure they had done just that.

I wasn’t born in this Aliwal Road, but in St. John’s Hill Grove not so far away. January 13th, that was, in the year 1894. I don’t know who rented the house, but I find it hard to believe it was my parents. And that word sounds remote because my father wasn’t exactly a fixture. My twin sister managed to be born on the same day, and I was brought up – probably by her! – to believe that she was twenty minutes older than I was. Years later she said she grew up thinking I was the older, but later she went back on that!

A continuing statement of mine is that I remember measuring my height by the mantelpiece in a new house; could it have been Aliwal Road? Blast Aliwal Road! Even after it had become – what it had become you shall perhaps see – it kept demanding something, this road and that ‘upstairs’ of number sixty.

But what do I mean ‘what it became’? I wonder why I wrote that. I must have meant how its impact on me continued – but I wrote what I wrote although I am not satisfied that I know exactly why I wrote it. Certainly I retain an exact picture of the four rooms where seven of us lived. There was (the adults in order of age) Aunt Lottie, Aunt Jenny, Mama, my three sisters and me. The two aunts slept in the top room next to the bathroom. Nobody ever went into it except themselves, not that I wanted to do so – what masculine soul I had shied away. Shy – how many a war has plagued humanity because somebody was just too shy to say what needed to be said at the right moment, months or years before its outbreak?

But that room upstairs. I was in it in a dream ten days or so ago, but never before, not even in a dream. Where the rest of us slept is not so clear in my memory. The room with which this book opens once shared me for a short while with my father and mother. I recall, as through a mist, vague curiosities, vague fears. I could swear that once when alone I saw a black ghost, head only, floating round the room.

One moment! I now remember sleeping there in the same bed as my second sister and not liking it at all. I wonder how old I was then? I sense that my father must have deserted us all by then.

Later we managed to turn that room into a ‘sitting room’, where we never sat except on Christmas Day, when we risked the expense of delighting in a coal fire. From the age of thirteen years to eighteen years I slept in this sitting room, making up a bed on the floor at night and rolling it up when I had emerged in the morning. I imagine I was glad of the independence, but know that I sometimes wondered what it was like to have a proper bed.

One other memory before I seal up the house, if I can. I once had toothache – this must have been at an earlier period - and was in such a rage that I went blue, I was told (surely not blue?), and leapt over a double bed. I believe I did have a violent temper but it must have showed itself only once in a blue moon.

The alternative to the five of us living with the two aunts was, so we dreaded, the workhouse. Certainly we knew the word workhouse, and if we were naughty and sometimes for other reasons, we were threatened with the wretched place. My mother was an ‘uncertificated’ teacher earning, unless I have it wrong, sixty pounds a year.

Aunt Lottie was the eldest of thirteen children of a Suffolk family, and she had brought up my mother, who was the youngest. Charlotte Wilcox was quite a remarkable character. She had married a man who was expected to live for only a few months. She was a widow who could not go out far, if at all, because during a spell in hospital her feet had been neglected and the nails had become like horn. She always had holes specially cut out in her shoes. Aunt Jennie (Jane Pain) was unmarried. She used to travel to London proper each day and cut out dress patterns for a paper called ‘The Lady’. From time to time she would bring back with her a packet of ‘half-sheets’, the unused halves of letters, and these would be stacked on the kitchen dresser for use. She would also bring back books which had been sent for review. These were always novels, and when I was – what? about eleven - I read them. I can remember the name of only one, ‘The Love Thirst of Elaine’. I suppose they scratched something on my romantic soul. I can recall no deep stirring. By the age of thirteen I had turned to other books, having at eleven won one of the very first junior county scholarships awarded by the London County Council in 1905.

But I haven’t reached that yet. My eye is still on the dresser of sixty Aliwal Road. There stood a jug of cold tea. Those two words should be hyphened and stand between inverted commas. The half sheets, the cold tea, the oil lamp, my head on the fully occupied table at night with ‘If you’re sleepy, why don’t you go to bed?’, then two years of silence, later on when I had had more than I could stand of I didn’t know what.

I will finish my picture. At meals Aunt Jenny, as the one who paid the rent and had taken the five of us in, sat at the head of the deal table with, on her left side a treadle sewing machine. On her right, but not, oh no not, on the same side sat her elder sister, who had cooked the meal. Next to her sat two of my sisters. My mother sat alone opposite Aunt Jenny. I sat on her right fairly well squeezed in to the wall and on the left side of my youngest sister. The dresser was opposite me next to the stove. Behind Aunt Jenny was the scullery where I used to be bathed when young by Aunt Lottie in a tin tub, waiting for the inevitable words, ‘Now you wash your little thing’. Little thing? However did we all fit in?

After my first academic success, when I was concerned with books and coming top of the form, I rigged up a kind of home-made desk across a corner, and of this I was jealously possessive, once being wildly angry with my twin sister for not taking it seriously and scribbling on my ‘private’ notepaper. Only one reminder of that period now remains, a copy of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ with my mother’s neat writing in it, a present for a birthday. If I received it on my thirteenth birthday, then it was on the day that I presented my twin sister with poems of my own composition carefully sewn together into a booklet. I did it out of much love and with a sense that we – we - were growing up. She laughed. I snatched the booklet (scorned as I felt), tore it to pieces and flung them into a pail in the scullery – the only copy of my juvenilia! I shall never know how metaphysical I was at the burdensome age of thirteen years. There was a poem ‘To my Dear Sister’ and one about the misery of city dwellers – I had never been in the country and it was about five years before I saw the sea and was inflamed not by the sea but by the red poppies dotted amidst the corn.