THE PASSING OF PUMP LANE

Otago Witness, Issue 4074, 12 April 1932, Page 9

THE PASSING OF PUMP LANE

By

Jan Struther.

Ours, in the words of the old song, is a nice house. That is to say, we have lived in it for just under a year and we are still “house-conscious”; the first .fine careless rapture has not yet been worn off by too many bills for plumbing and roof repairs, and there are quite a lot of people left to whom we can say, after dinner, “ Would it amuse you to see the rest of the house ? ” in such a tone that they haven’t the heart to say, “ No.” But after they have been dragged upstairs to see the roof garden and downstairs to inspect the oil-fired central heating, and we have just come back to the drawing room again and settled down to bridge—then, as likely as not. a shrill scream will rend the air, and there will rise to our windows the sound of lively skirmishing and a woman’s voice angrily shouting, “ Ern—ayl” “ Oh, yes,” we explain apologetically. “ Of course, Pump lane is rather a drawback; but they’re going to begin clearing it out quite soon—such a relief.”

For although our front windows face on to the orderly stucco perspective of Sycamore square, with its trees, its fountain and its strip of green lawn, the back of our house has a very different prospect. It looks, in fact, on to Pump lane, which is a narrow cobbled cul-de-sac bordered by a row of dilapidated twostorey cottages. Its inhabitants are a decent enough lot of people—taxi-drivers, labourers, and the like—poor, cheerful, and as clean as the fundamental inconvenience of their houses will allow them to be, which is not very. There are about three families in each house and each family has on an average three children, who spend most of the day playing in the street: the two noisiest are Doris (who was brought into the world rather audibly five months ago on a night when we had some complete strangers dining with us) and Mick-ay, who is three, and has red hair and a warlike disposition. Most of the screams which float tip to our windows can be traced directly or indirectly to Mick-ay: either he himself is screaming because his mother has smacked him, or else he has made Ern-ay scream by taking away his favourite tin can, and Ernay’s mother is standing in her doorway, arms akimbo, and telling Mick-ay’s mother what she thinks of her and her methods of upbringing. Meanwhile Doris lies in a soapbox mounted on a dilapidated pram chassis, clutching at her own toes when she is feeling happy and roaring unrestrainedly when she isn’t. Her mother, in defiance of text books and welfare centres, stuffs a rubber dummy into her mouth whenever she cries, having first sucked it herself to make quite sure that it is clean. In spite of this kiiid of thing, and in spite of living, so far as I can see, entirely on jam and white bread, the Pump lane children are rayishingly beautiful and unreasonably , healthy. Their complexions, though streaked with jam, tears, and grime, are clear and rosy; titeir hair, though in some ways not above suspicion, twists itself into natural curls the like of which never appear on the heads of our own Benjic and Betsinda, crimp we never so cunningly.

At tea time the older children come hack from school and the din becomes more complex. The most popular sport at the moment is yodelling, in which several of them have attained an uncanny proficiency. Now this is an art-form which may sound tolerable or even charming when practised among mountain pastures, but in a narrow and reverberating street it lacks appeal. Where do they learn it? Is the taxpayer’s money being used to give yodelling classes in the elementary schools, or is this craze the second or third-hand result of the recent Tyrolese invasion of the London theatres? Be that as it may, the theatre and the kinema are certainly responsible for another of Pump lane’s less attractive features: namely, the devilish reiteration by Frederick, aged 20 months, of the expression, “Oh yeah?” It is the only thing he has yet learned to say, and he says it a great deal. One day I counted 17 repetitions of the abominable phrase in 10 minutes; then, I think, he must have found a crust in the gutter, for a blessed silence fell. But a little while later I heard his mother saying proudly, “ C’mon, let Mrs Wilson ’ear you talk, duck”; and nothing loath Frederick began again. I gave it up and worked for the rest of the morning in the dining room, overlooking the neat, clean emptiness of the Square. Only a few' mouths more, I thought to myself consolingly. . . .

We have just come back after six weeks in the country to find that the reclamation of Pump lane has been put in hand during our absence. Most of the little houses have already' been forsaken by their human inhabitants, and under' the generalship of a zealous sanitary inspector are being laboriously' divested of their non-human ones. Some i of the non-human ones have come over to our garage for shelter: but only, thank God, the mammals. After all, ratting is good fun, and difficult to come by in London. The few remaining Pump lane children look upon the empty houses as their own special perquisites: they have broken all the window's they can reaclij. pulled the bedraggled Virginia creeper off the walls, trampled the miniature gardens underfoot, and torn up the

painted wooden palings that surrounded them. The palings make excellent swords, and the pointed ends can be driven into the ground for cricket stumps. ,

The two furthest houses are nearly' finished, and through the new latticed casements I can catch a glimpse of tiny' parquet floors, fitted washbasins and electric fires. Outside, too, they are almost unrecognisable, with their freshly pointed brickwork, their oak front doors, their wrought-iron knockers, and the neat posts and chains which have'taken the place of the faded wooden palings. One of them has a board up saving “ Disposed Of,” and a newly married couple comes and moons about in it every day with foot rules and patterns of cretonne. The young man is exquisitely clean and pink, and wears a rather tight jacket and a very blue shirt; the girl has blonde elaborate hair escaping from beneath a carefully Bohemian hat; their car, which blocks up half Pump lane, is the kind that wears a broad leather strap round its bonnet. Wc hate them.

This morning we stood at our drawing room window' watching the last of the old families moving out of Pump lane. It was the Jackmans —father, mother, Gladys, Ellen, and Mick-ay; Gladys and Ellen were two of our keenest yodellers, and Mick-ay’s characteristics I have mentioned before. The remover was old Miniver from round the corner in Brow'n street, who hangs out a sign saying, “ Work Done with Horse and Van.” The horse stands 13 hands if an inch; the van is a converted coster’s barrow. Still, it held the Jackmans* belongings all right: bits of them could be seen sticking out from under the ragged tarpaulin —the head of a rusty brass bedstead; a bit of the black horsehair sofa ou which, presumably, the two elder children used to sleep; a broom handle, and a large pink china vase. “ Well, that’s the lot,” we heard Mr Jackman say. “ We’d best be getting along, Mr Miniver.” “Kerp!” cried old Miniver to the horse, who strained forward valiantly, his small hoofs slipping on the cobbles, but at the last moment came the familiar screech of “Mick-ay!” and Mrs Jack man was forced to rush back to, collect her youngest, who had had an eleventhhour urge to take one of the old palings with him for a gun. Yelling lustily but still clutching his gun, he was

dragged along in the wake of the retreating van.

“Well, that’s that,” I said, as his howls grew fainter. “ Yes,” said T.

“It’ll be a bit quieter now,” I continued brightly. “ It’s really been awful, trying to get any work done with all those screeching children about.” “ Yes,” said T. “And besides.” I went on, talking rather loud, “it’ll be ever so much nicer for them in the Buildings. Water laid on, and gas. And no bugs.” “Mm,” said T., and we stood at the window for a minute listening to the unaccustomed silence of Pump lane. “ Oh, damn,” I “ I wish they hadn’t gone.”

“I know,” said T.—The Spectator.